r guides for authors should implement more stringen requirements for citing taxonomic materials or processe used to arrive at species names for publication in ecologica journals [1]. Although we agree with the general sentimen that greater diligence is necessary when attributing spe cies names to taxonomic units, the suggestions he has pu forward are unrealistic, and could diminish, rather than...

Introduction The detection of a new species is the result of a decision-making process, one that has traditionally and primarily been based upon the discovery of distinguishing characters (Cronquist 1978;Mayr 1982;Winston 1999; Sites &Marshall 2004). This process, called diagnosis, is acutely important as it necessarily lies at the crux of the discovery of biodiversity, including the identifica...

Species identification is a difficult task, ranging from the definition of the species concept itself to the definition of the threshold for speciation. DNA Barcode technology uses a fragment of the Cytochrome Oxidase I (COI) gene as a molecular tool that many studies have already validated as a tool for species identification. DNA barcode sequences for COI were generated and analyzed from 805 ...

s MEDNET 2000: Poster presentations 219 whereby a set of individuals or units, termed as “Operational Taxonomic Units” (OTU). Techniques of cluster analysis can be applied in different fields of medicine: the recognition of various clinical forms of a disease, separation of distinctive racial groups, treatment of quantitative biogeographical data, etc. Results: An important case for statistical...

The amount of information that is available on 16S rRNA sequences for prokaryotes thanks to high-throughput sequencing could allow a better understanding of diversity. Nevertheless, the application of predetermined threshold in genetic distances to identify units of diversity (Operative Taxonomic Units, OTUs) may provide biased results. Here we tests for the existence of a barcoding gap in seve...

A bacteria library was constructed from the caecum of a rabbit maintained under standard conditions. The complete gene 16S rRNA gene was sequenced. The 228 clones obtained were distributed in 70 operational taxonomic units (OTUs). The large majority of the OTUs were composed of one or two clones and seven OTUs contained half of the sequences. Fourteen sequences had high similarity to the sequen...

The bacterial communities inhabiting arthropods are generally dominated by a few endosymbionts that play an important role in the ecology of their hosts. Rather than comparing bacterial species richness across samples, ecological studies on arthropod endosymbionts often seek to identify the main bacterial strains associated with each specimen studied. The filtering out of contaminants from the ...