New publication

‘Rotten eggs’ in genetic fingerprints of species!? A new bioinformatics tool for cleaning DNA barcode data detects incorrect data sets rapidly and is provided free of charge. The tool TaxCI, developed by a German scientist team under the aegis of the Zoological Research Museum Alexander Koenig – Leibniz Institute for Biodiversity of Animals (ZFMK) in Bonn, reveals sources of error that are discovered during the validation of DNA barcodes. Now, potential deficiencies, for example caused by an incorrect  determination or by a contamination of a sample, can be detected quickly and reliably in huge DNA barcode data sets – even before the barcodes enter the databases used by researchers worldwide like BOLD and GenBank. The work was published in the renowned journal Methods in Ecology and Evolution.