DNA Barcoding: A Tool to Assess and Conserve Marine Biodiversity

Accurate Species diagnosis is the key element for biodiversity studies and conservation planning. Conventionally, morphological characters are used to identify a species. But, this approach needs a thorough expertise in identifying the external features which often leads to narrowing down of specialization with regard to ascertaining a species within a limited group of taxa. The approach may be particularly valuable for species identification of organisms that are rare, fragile, and/or small, especially when morphological identification is problematic and errors are likely due to simple or evolutionarily conserved body plans. However, each time a new technique has been introduced in science it was accompanied by some debate and distress, and DNA barcoding was no exception. Therefore, more collaborative efforts are needed to explore the potentialities of DNA barcoding in proper species identification across all taxa. At the same time, we need to set a threshold of the genetic variation in species delimitation to find out the cryptic species. It is also an important point to know that the benefits of DNA barcoding are not restricted to taxonomic or systematic research only. The discovery of high-throughput sequencing technologies are going to change the dimension of these techniques in the years to come.