Sinniger Frederic, Reimer James D, Pawlowski Jan
Department of Chemistry, Biology and Marine Science, Faculty of Science, University of the Ryukyus, 1 Senbaru, Nishihara, Okinawa 903-0213, Japan.
Zoolog Sci. 2008 Dec;25(12):1253-60. doi: 10.2108/zsj.25.1253.
The order Zoantharia is known for its chaotic taxonomy and difficult morphological identification. One method that potentially could help for examining such troublesome taxa is DNA barcoding, which identifies species using standard molecular markers. The mitochondrial cytochrome oxidase subunit I (COI) has been utilized to great success in groups such as birds and insects; however, its applicability in many other groups is controversial. Recently, some studies have suggested that barcoding is not applicable to anthozoans. Here, we examine the use of COI and mitochondrial 16S ribosomal DNA for zoanthid identification. Despite the absence of a clear barcoding gap, our results show that for most of 54 zoanthid samples, both markers could separate samples to the species, or species group, level, particularly when easily accessible ecological or distributional data were included. Additionally, we have used the short V5 region of mt 16S rDNA to identify eight old (13 to 50 years old) museum samples. We discuss advantages and disadvantages of COI and mt 16S rDNA as barcodes for Zoantharia, and recommend that either one or both of these markers be considered for zoanthid identification in the future.
群体海葵目因其混乱的分类法和困难的形态学鉴定而闻名。一种可能有助于研究此类棘手分类群的方法是DNA条形码技术，它使用标准分子标记来识别物种。线粒体细胞色素氧化酶亚基I（COI）在鸟类和昆虫等类群中已取得巨大成功；然而，其在许多其他类群中的适用性存在争议。最近，一些研究表明条形码技术不适用于珊瑚虫纲动物。在此，我们研究了COI和线粒体16S核糖体DNA在群体海葵鉴定中的应用。尽管没有明显的条形码间隙，但我们的结果表明，对于54个群体海葵样本中的大多数，这两种标记都可以将样本区分到物种或物种组水平，特别是当纳入易于获取的生态或分布数据时。此外，我们使用了线粒体16S rDNA的短V5区域来鉴定八个年代久远（13至50年）的博物馆样本。我们讨论了COI和线粒体16S rDNA作为群体海葵目条形码的优缺点，并建议在未来群体海葵鉴定中考虑使用这两种标记中的一种或两种。
