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Citation for Study 16661

About Citation title: "DNA barcoding and mini-barcoding as a powerful tool for feather mite studies".
About Study name: "DNA barcoding and mini-barcoding as a powerful tool for feather mite studies".
About This study is part of submission 16661 (Status: Published).

Citation

Do?a J. 2015. DNA barcoding and mini-barcoding as a powerful tool for feather mite studies. Molecular Ecology Resources, .

Authors

  • Do?a J. (submitter) Phone (+34) 954 232 340

Abstract

Feather mites (Astigmata: Analgoidea, Pterolichoidea) are among the most abundantand commonly occurring bird ectosymbionts. Basic questions on the ecology and evolution of feather mites remain unanswered because feather mite species identification is often only possible for adult males and it is laborious even for specialised taxonomists, thus precluding large-scale identifications. Here, we tested DNA barcoding as a useful molecular tool to identify feather mites from passerine birds. 361 specimens of 72 species of feather mites from 68 species of European passerine birds from Russia and Spain were barcoded. The accuracy of barcoding and mini-barcoding was tested. Moreover, threshold choice (a controversial issue in barcoding studies) was also explored in a new way, by calculating through simulations the effect of sampling effort (in species number and species composition) on threshold calculations. We found one 200 bp mini-barcode region that showed the same accuracy as the full-length barcode (602 bp) and was surrounded by conserved regions potentially useful for group-specific degenerate primers. Species identification accuracy was perfect (100%) but decreased when singletons or species of the Proctophyllodes pinnatus group were included. In fact, barcoding confirmed previous taxonomic issues within the Proctophyllodes pinnatus group. Following an integrative taxonomy approach, we compared our barcode study with previous taxonomic knowledge on feather mites, discovering three new putative cryptic species and validating three previous morphologically different (but still undescribed) new species.

Keywords

barcode threshold, cryptic species, host-symbiont interactions, mtDNA, COI, mini-barcoding, DNA barcoding

External links

About this resource

  • Canonical resource URI: http://purl.org/phylo/treebase/phylows/study/TB2:S16661
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