[Taxacom] Taxonomy &DNA barcoding

[Dr. David Campbell]

I'd love to have a barcode gene sequenced for all the taxa I'm working 
on, but sometimes it can be quite unreliable (e.g., cox1 is sometimes 
too variable and there are probable pseudogenes), not to mention the 
impossibility of doing this for all the fossils.

I haven't seen significant trickle-down funding relating to barcoding, 
though it did work as a way to promote publication of one paper.  
Conversely, barcoding was a terrible specter invoked to justify poor 
reviews of another paper (which, on re-reading, was indeed not so clear 
as to what interpretation we were giving to the sequence variation, 
even if some of the criticisms were simply wrong).  

More fundamentally, barcoding seems in practice to be following the 
same problematic trend as several other big, well-funded projects over 
recent years, namely spending the funds on development of electronic 
infrastructure rather than on support of the actual taxonomy (including 
sequence generation).  I tried to put data into BOLD some time ago and 
was unable to either add information or to contact anyone about the 
problem.  On the other hand, I think barcoding has been mentioned 
recently as having been promised a lot more funding than it has 
actually received, so part of the problem lies in the overall poor 
funding for basic research in systematics.  

Of course, to get large grants you need established employment and to 
get employed, you have to have a track record of large grants.

-- 
Dr. David Campbell
425 Scientific Collections Building
Department of Biological Sciences
Biodiversity and Systematics
University of Alabama, Box 870345
Tuscaloosa AL 35487-0345  USA