%0 Journal Article
%T When species matches are unavailable are DNA barcodes correctly assigned to higher taxa? An assessment using sphingid moths
%A John Wilson
%A Rodolphe Rougerie
%A Justin Schonfeld
%A Daniel H Janzen
%A Winnie Hallwachs
%A Mehrdad Hajibabaei
%A Ian J Kitching
%A Jean Haxaire
%A Paul DN Hebert
%J BMC Ecology
%D 2011
%I BioMed Central
%R 10.1186/1472-6785-11-18
%X A liberal tree-based criterion assigned 83% of queries accurately to genus, 74% to tribe and 90% to subfamily, compared to a strict tree-based criterion, which assigned 75% of queries accurately to genus, 66% to tribe and 84% to subfamily, with a library containing 100% of available species (but excluding the species of the query). The greater number of true positives delivered by more relaxed criteria was negatively balanced by the occurrence of more false positives. This effect was most sharply observed with libraries of the lowest completeness where, for example at the genus level, 32% of assignments were false positives with the liberal criterion versus < 1% when using the strict. We observed little difference (< 8% using the liberal criterion) however, in the overall accuracy of the assignments between the lowest and highest levels of library completeness at the tribe and subfamily level.Our results suggest that when using a strict tree-based criterion for higher taxon assignment with DNA barcodes, the likelihood of assigning a query a genus name incorrectly is very low, if a genus name is provided it has a high likelihood of being accurate, and if no genus match is available the query can nevertheless be assigned to a subfamily with high accuracy regardless of library completeness. DNA barcoding often correctly assigned sphingid moths to higher taxa when species matches were unavailable, suggesting that barcode reference libraries can be useful for higher taxon assignments long before they achieve complete species coverage.Taxonomic assignments are crucial for effective communication of biological research, enabling comparability between studies. Yet, the ability to categorize biodiversity effectively and accurately is hampered by a lack of taxonomic experts [1]. DNA barcoding has been proposed as a method capable of partially alleviating this "taxonomic impediment" by enabling accurate species identifications by non-specialists using nucleotide comparisons ac
%U http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6785/11/18