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Abstract
DNA barcoding has been widely used to identify and discover new species in a wide range of taxa. In order to assess the effectiveness of COI (cytochrome C oxidase subunit I) and 16S (16S ribosomal RNA) in the discrimination of spiders, we have generated 289 barcodes for a total of 56 farmland spider species from 14 different families for the first time in China. Our results reveal that the standard barcoding marker COI can be used to distinguish the farmland spiders both in species and family level by NJ tree-based method, despite the absence of a barcode gap between the intra- and inter-specific genetic divergences. 16S has a lower species identification success as compared with COI. However, almost 98% of the species can be correctly distinguished for both COI and 16S when a threshold of 3% nucleotide divergence was used for species discrimination. Our study significantly improves the barcode reference sequence library for Chinese farmland spiders, and will be very useful in pest management and eco-environmental monitoring and protection.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Chao-Feng Lu and Dr. Guang-Fu Liu (Zhejiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Biometrology and Inspection and Quarantine, College of Life Sciences, China Jiliang University) for their help with the collection of the spider specimen. This work was financially supported by the National High Technology Research and Development Program of China (863 Program) (Grant no. 2012AA021601) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant no. 31601698).
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.