Does the DNA barcoding gap exist – a case study in blue butterflies (Lepidoptera Lycaenidae).docVIP

Frontiers in Zoology BioMedCentral Research Open Access Does the DNA barcoding gap exist? – a case study in blue butterflies (Lepidoptera: Lycaenidae) Martin Wiemers* and Konrad Fiedler Address: Department of Population Ecology, Faculty of Life Sciences, University of Vienna, Althanstrasse 14, 1090 Vienna, Austria Email: Martin Wiemers* - martin.wiemers@univie.ac.at; Konrad Fiedler - konrad.fiedler@univie.ac.at * Corresponding author Published: 7 March 2007 Received: 1 December 2006 Accepted: 7 March 2007 Frontiers in Zoology 2007, 4:8 doi:10.1186/1742-9994-4-8 This article is available from: /content/4/1/8 ? 2007 Wiemers and Fiedler; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: DNA barcoding, i.e. the use of a 648 bp section of the mitochondrial gene cytochrome c oxidase I, has recently been promoted as useful for the rapid identification and discovery of species. Its success is dependent either on the strength of the claim that interspecific variation exceeds intraspecific variation by one order of magnitude, thus establishing a barcoding gap, or on the reciprocal monophyly of species. Results: We present an analysis of intra- and interspecific variation in the butterfly family Lycaenidae which includes a well-sampled clade (genus Agrodiaetus) with a peculiar characteristic: most of its members are karyologically differentiated from each other which facilitates the recognition of species as reproductively isolated units even in allopatric populations. The analysis shows that there is an 18% overlap in the range of intra- and interspecific COI sequence divergence due to low interspecific divergence between many closely related species.