title: Coalescing molecular evolution and DNA barcoding.
abstract: The DNA barcoding concept (Woese et al. ; Hebert et al. ) has considerably boosted taxonomy research by facilitating the identification of specimens and discovery of new species. Used alone or in combination with DNA metabarcoding on environmental samples (Taberlet et al. ), the approach is becoming a standard for basic and applied research in ecology, evolution and conservation across taxa, communities and ecosystems (Scheffers et al. ; Kress et al. ). However, DNA barcoding suffers from several shortcomings that still remain overlooked, especially when it comes to species delineation (Collins & Cruickshank ). In this issue of Molecular Ecology, Barley & Thomson () demonstrate that the choice of models of sequence evolution has substantial impacts on inferred genetic distances, with a propensity of the widely used Kimura 2-parameter model to lead to underestimated species richness. While DNA barcoding has been and will continue to be a powerful tool for specimen identification and preliminary taxonomic sorting, this work calls for a systematic assessment of substitution models fit on barcoding data used for species delineation and reopens the debate on the limitation of this approach.
authors.affiliation: CNRS, ENFA, UMR 5174 EDB, Université Toulouse 3 Paul Sabatier, F-31062, Toulouse, France.
authors.forename: Lucie
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Zinger
authors.affiliation: Centre de Théorisation et de Modélisation de la Biodiversité, UMR CNRS 5321, Station d'Ecologie Théorique et Expérimentale, Moulis, 09200, France.
authors.forename: Hervé
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Philippe
mesh_terms: D004247:DNA / Q000235:genetics*; D058893:DNA Barcoding, Taxonomic; D004463:Ecology; D019143:Evolution, Molecular
chemical_list: D004247:DNA
keywords: clustering methods; genetic distances; posterior predictive simulations; species delimitation