RT Journal Article SR Electronic T1 Strengthening marine amphipod DNA barcode libraries for environmental monitoring JF bioRxiv FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory SP 2020.08.26.268896 DO 10.1101/2020.08.26.268896 A1 Chinnamani Prasannakumar A1 Ganesh Manikantan A1 J. Vijaylaxmi A1 Balakrishnan Gunalan A1 Seerangan Manokaran A1 S. R. Pugazhvendan YR 2020 UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2020/10/15/2020.08.26.268896.abstract AB Environmental DNA barcoding technology is gaining innovative applications. The effectiveness of current DNA barcode reference libraries in identifying amphipod barcodes and/or strengthening the existing library was tested. From 2500 amphipod individuals we barcoded 22 amphipod species belonging to 17 genera, 13 families among which 13 species were first time barcoded. More than 80 percent of the species were new distributional records. The minimum and maximum inter-specific pair-wise distance values was respectively 0.16 and 5.51 percent. Defining family specific species threshold values would be imperative, rather than expecting a universal barcode gap for amphipod species. The overall mean pair-wise distance, nucleotide diversity and Tajima’s statistics were 3.59 percent, 0.27 and 2.62, respectively. There is a strong need to increase the number of amphipod species barcodes in the reference database. For better facilitation of environmental monitoring, the datasets could be exclusively accessed at BOLD through http://dx.doi.org/10.5883/DS-MAOI.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.