title: Barcoding Neotropical birds: assessing the impact of nonmonophyly in a highly diverse group.
abstract: In this study, we verified the power of DNA barcodes to discriminate Neotropical birds using Bayesian tree reconstructions of a total of 7404 COI sequences from 1521 species, including 55 Brazilian species with no previous barcode data. We found that 10.4% of species were nonmonophyletic, most likely due to inaccurate taxonomy, incomplete lineage sorting or hybridization. At least 0.5% of the sequences (2.5% of the sampled species) retrieved from GenBank were associated with database errors (poor-quality sequences, NuMTs, misidentification or unnoticed hybridization). Paraphyletic species (5.8% of the total) can be related to rapid speciation events leading to nonreciprocal monophyly between recently diverged sister species, or to absence of synapomorphies in the small COI region analysed. We also performed two series of genetic distance calculations under the K2P model for intraspecific and interspecific comparisons: the first included all COI sequences, and the second included only monophyletic taxa observed in the Bayesian trees. As expected, the mean and median pairwise distances were smaller for intraspecific than for interspecific comparisons. However, there was no precise 'barcode gap', which was shown to be larger in the monophyletic taxon data set than for the data from all species, as expected. Our results indicated that although database errors may explain some of the difficulties in the species discrimination of Neotropical birds, distance-based barcode assignment may also be compromised because of the high diversity of bird species and more complex speciation events in the Neotropics.
authors.affiliation: Laboratório de Biodiversidade e Evolução Molecular, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Avenida Antônio Carlos, 6627, Bloco L3, Sala 244, Belo Horizonte, CEP: 31270-901, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
authors.forename: Bárbara R N
authors.initials: BR
authors.lastname: Chaves
authors.affiliation: Laboratório de Biodiversidade e Evolução Molecular, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Avenida Antônio Carlos, 6627, Bloco L3, Sala 244, Belo Horizonte, CEP: 31270-901, Minas Gerais, Brazil.|Programa de Pós-Graduação em Manejo e Conservação de Ecossistemas Naturais e Agrários, Universidade Federal de Viçosa, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas e da Saúde, campus Florestal, Rodovia LMG-818, km 6, Florestal, CEP: 35690-000, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
authors.forename: Anderson V
authors.initials: AV
authors.lastname: Chaves
authors.affiliation: Laboratório de Biodiversidade e Evolução Molecular, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Avenida Antônio Carlos, 6627, Bloco L3, Sala 244, Belo Horizonte, CEP: 31270-901, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
authors.forename: Augusto C A
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Nascimento
authors.affiliation: Laboratório de Biodiversidade e Evolução Molecular, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Avenida Antônio Carlos, 6627, Bloco L3, Sala 244, Belo Horizonte, CEP: 31270-901, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
authors.forename: Juliana
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Chevitarese
authors.affiliation: Museu de Ciências Naturais, Pontifícia Universidade Católica de Minas Gerais, Avenida Dom José Gaspar, 290, Belo Horizonte, CEP: 30535-610, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
authors.forename: Marcelo F
authors.initials: MF
authors.lastname: Vasconcelos
authors.affiliation: Laboratório de Biodiversidade e Evolução Molecular, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Instituto de Ciências Biológicas, Avenida Antônio Carlos, 6627, Bloco L3, Sala 244, Belo Horizonte, CEP: 31270-901, Minas Gerais, Brazil.
authors.forename: Fabrício R
authors.initials: FR
authors.lastname: Santos
mesh_terms: D000818:Animals; D001717:Birds / Q000145:classification* / Q000235:genetics*; D001938:Brazil; D058893:DNA Barcoding, Taxonomic / Q000379:methods*; D008969:Molecular Sequence Data; D010802:Phylogeny; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA
keywords: DNA barcoding; birds; neotropical fauna; passerines; phylogenetic methods; speciation