New mitochondrial primers for metabarcoding of insects, designed and evaluated using in silico methods.

ABSTRACT: Insect metabarcoding has been mainly based on PCR amplification of short fragments within the "barcoding region" of the gene cytochrome oxidase I (COI). However, because of the variability of this gene, it has been difficult to design good universal PCR primers. Most primers used today are associated with gaps in the taxonomic coverage or amplification biases that make the results less reliable and impede the detection of species that are present in the sample. We identify new primers for insect metabarcoding using computational approaches (ecoprimers and degeprime) applied to the most comprehensive reference databases of mitochondrial genomes of Hexapoda assembled to date. New primers are evaluated in silico against previously published primers in terms of taxonomic coverage and resolutio

SUBMITTER: Marquina D 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7379581 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature