title: DNA barcoding Bromeliaceae: achievements and pitfalls.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  DNA barcoding has been successfully established in animals as a tool for organismal identification and taxonomic clarification. Slower nucleotide substitution rates in plant genomes have made the selection of a DNA barcode for land plants a much more difficult task. The Plant Working Group of the Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL) recommended the two-marker combination rbcL/matK as a pragmatic solution to a complex trade-off between universality, sequence quality, discrimination, and cost.
  
  
  RESULTS
  It is expected that a system based on any one, or a small number of plastid genes will fail within certain taxonomic groups with low amounts of plastid variation, while performing well in others. We tested the effectiveness of the proposed CBOL Plant Working Group barcoding markers for land plants in identifying 46 bromeliad species, a group rich in endemic species from the endangered Brazilian Atlantic Rainforest. Although we obtained high quality sequences with the suggested primers, species discrimination in our data set was only 43.48%. Addition of a third marker, trnH-psbA, did not show significant improvement. This species identification failure in Bromeliaceaecould also be seen in the analysis of the GenBank's matK data set. Bromeliaceae's sequence divergence was almost three times lower than the observed for Asteraceae and Orchidaceae. This low variation rate also resulted in poorly resolved tree topologies. Among the three Bromeliaceae subfamilies sampled, Tillandsioideae was the only one recovered as a monophyletic group with high bootstrap value (98.6%). Species paraphyly was a common feature in our sampling.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  Our results show that although DNA barcoding is an important tool for biodiversity assessment, it tends to fail in taxonomy complicated and recently diverged plant groups, such as Bromeliaceae. Additional research might be needed to develop markers capable to discriminate species in these complex botanical groups.
authors.affiliation: Instituto de Bioquímica Médica, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
authors.forename: Vitor Hugo
authors.initials: VH
authors.lastname: Maia
authors.forename: Camila Souza da
authors.initials: CS
authors.lastname: Mata
authors.forename: Luciana Ozório
authors.initials: LO
authors.lastname: Franco
authors.forename: Mônica Aires
authors.initials: MA
authors.lastname: Cardoso
authors.forename: Sérgio Ricardo Sodré
authors.initials: SR
authors.lastname: Cardoso
authors.forename: Adriana Silva
authors.initials: AS
authors.lastname: Hemerly
authors.forename: Paulo Cavalcanti Gomes
authors.initials: PC
authors.lastname: Ferreira
mesh_terms: D001483:Base Sequence; D031229:Bromeliaceae / Q000145:classification* / Q000235:genetics*; D058893:DNA Barcoding, Taxonomic / Q000379:methods*; D030541:Databases, Genetic; D010802:Phylogeny; D018087:Plastids / Q000235:genetics; D016133:Polymerase Chain Reaction; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA