Future perspectives of DNA barcoding in marine zooplanktons and invertebrates

Abstract

The World registry of marine species as of May, 2015 show 229,409 accepted species; of which 220,461 checked (96 %) 421,632 species names including synonyms 527,721 taxon names. Therefore there was a desperate need for developing new molecular method for clarifying obscurities in customary taxonomy. As most of the organisms in marine habitat are microscopic, sample size is large, and most of all the sample preservation is a tricky and expertise requiring job, marine taxonomic identification progress has been very slow. Therefore there was an urgent need of “fast, simple, reliable and inexpensive” method for identification of marine diversity and the answer came as a technique known as “DNA Barcoding”. DNA barcoding has emerged as an ideal technique for taxonomic identification of marine taxa, as morphological characters are less reliable and often lead to cryptic species overlapping. Combining genomic study with DNA barcode can be a very effective solution. With all the advantages and limitations there is a strong implementation of DNA barcode on large scale barcode campaigns that will provide enormous amount of data for proper marine taxonomy especially in marine invertebrates.