Revealing Planetary Biodiversity: Protocols, Platforms, and Progress in DNA Barcoding

Dear Colleagues,

Because of technological advances over the past decade, biodiversity science is transitioning from its analogue past to a digital future. This shift reflects the fact that identification systems based on the analysis of sequence variation in short, standardized gene regions (i.e., DNA barcodes) are very effective in species discrimination. This approach has gained increased momentum as the capabilities of high-throughput sequencers have risen. By permitting the inexpensive acquisition of millions of barcode records, these instruments are enabling biodiversity surveys at speeds and scales that were previously inconceivable. Using sequence information biodiversity change will soon be tracked across continents and oceans, and these results will be placed in a temporal perspective by sequencing specimens which have been archived for centuries. This advance requires support—new protocols to optimize sequence recovery and new informatics platforms to aid data storage and analysis. Aside from its revolutionary impacts on ecology, evolution and conservation biology, DNA barcoding is contributing important new insights into socio-economic endeavors, such as environmental stewardship, agriculture, and public health. This Special Issue will assemble articles that consider the protocols, the implications, and the utility of DNA barcoding in understanding, managing, and forecasting biodiversity in a world empowered by near limitless access to sequence information.

Dr. Mehrdad Hajibabaei
Dr. Paul Hebert
Guest Editors

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• DNA barcoding
• Biodiversity
• Genomics
• Phylogenetics
• Evolution
• Ecolog