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Annelid polychaetes have been seldom the focus of dedicated DNA barcoding
studies, despite their ecological relevance and often dominance,
particularly in soft-bottom estuarine and coastal marine ecosystems. Here,
we report the first assessment of the performance of DNA barcodes in the
discrimination of shallow water polychaete species from the southern
European Atlantic coast, focusing on specimens collected in estuaries and
coastal ecosystems of Portugal. We analysed cytochrome oxidase I DNA
barcodes (COI-5P) from 164 specimens, which were assigned to 51
morphospecies. To our data set from Portugal, we added available published
sequences selected from the same species, genus or family, to inspect for
taxonomic congruence among studies and collection location. The final data
set comprised 290 specimens and 79 morphospecies, which generated 99
Barcode Index Numbers (BINs) within Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD).
Among these, 22 BINs were singletons, 47 other BINs were concordant,
confirming the initial identification based on morphological characters,
and 30 were discordant, most of which consisted on multiple BINs found for
the same morphospecies. Some of the most prominent cases in the latter
category include Hediste diversicolor (O.F. Müller, 1776) (7), Eulalia
viridis (Linnaeus, 1767) (2) and Owenia fusiformis (delle Chiaje, 1844)
(5), all of them reported from Portugal and frequently used in ecological
studies as environmental quality indicators. Our results for these species
showed discordance between molecular lineages and morphospecies, or added
additional relatively divergent lineages. The potential inaccuracies in
environmental assessments, where underpinning polychaete species diversity
is poorly resolved or clarified, demand additional and extensive
investigation of the DNA barcode diversity in this group, in parallel with
alpha taxonomy efforts.
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