According to Hebert et al. (2003), animal species can be distinguished by comparing a 648-bp fragment of the mitochondrial cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI) gene. The length of the fragment is technically limited by the Sanger sequencing method. The COI barcoding can be used for two purposes:

·               detection (delimitation) of new species

·               identification of known species

In both cases, query sequences are compared with sequences stored in reference libraries like GenBank and BOLD (Barcode of Life Data Systems).

COI sequences have been chosen as species markers because it turned out that most animal species (except cnidarians) are separated from congeneric species by CO1 sequence divergences higher than 2%, while sequence divergences among conspecifics are usually less than 2% (Hebert et al., 2003). Misleadingly, this phenomenon is referred to as the “barcode gap” (Meyer & Paulay, 2005). More than 94% of morphologically defined bird species have been confirmed with COI as a species-level marker gene (Wang et al., 2020). In a comparative avian mitogenomic study, the CO1 gene proved to be the one with the least amount of rate heterogeneity across avian orders, thus being closest to a “molecular clock” (Pacheco et al., 2011). Thus, the suitability of COI gene sequences as indicators of species limits simply reflects the fact that they serve as a reliable time scale. [This should be seen as a strong argument to apply Chrono-Taxonomics.]

References

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