Building up a standard reference library for European DNA barcodes

– You are familiar with a particular family of European arthropods (especially pollinators)

– You are interested in DNA barcoding, metabarcoding, etc.

⇒ Would you like to help build a European reference database for metabarcoding?

As part of the Biodiversity Genomics Europe (BGE) project, an EU-funded Horizon Europe project, we are developing a semi-automatically curated reference database. This will be limited to European species and certain focus groups (pollinators, freshwater and marine species) and is essentially based on the curation of existing data on the BOLD (Barcode of Life Datasystem) platform.

This is initially done automatically using a bioinformatics pipeline, which compares the existing data with a list of European species, identifying synonyms and correcting spelling mistakes. Furthermore, the data is analysed and evaluated with regard to its quality (sequence and metadata). Data that pass this test are included in the reference database and data of poor quality are discarded.

Further details on our bioinformatics pipeline can be found on Zenodo, including the link to the code on GitHub.

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.11082683

However, there are many datasets with actually good quality that are only of limited use, e.g. due to BIN sharing (several species with the same BIN) or BIN splitting (one species with several BINs). Such problems can only be solved technically to a very limited extent and require the involvement of an expert. This is why we are contacting you and asking for your help. As you can see, we are trying to automate as much as possible in order to minimise the time and workload for you as experts and to be able to use your expertise in the most targeted way possible.

We hope that a curated reference database will lead to significantly better and more reliable hits in metabarcoding and thus benefit the expert community and far beyond. We are also planning to publish curated data packages and can offer you co-authorship here.

Certainly, such data publications will have a great impact on the scientific community, they will be widely used in applications (e.g. monitoring/metabarcoding) and receive high citation indices.

Families primarily requiring manual curation

These tables lists the families that primarily require manual curation by taxonomic experts. If you are an expert on one of these families and would like to contribute to the project by curating data, please contact us using the contact form below and indicate which group you are interested in.

Pollinators

Freshwater & Marine Species

Contact

If we have piqued your interest, please get in touch with us using this form and let us know which family you would like to curate.

Please feel free to forward this information to other interested experts and colleagues.