Assignment Task

Introduction

Only a small fraction of species on Earth have been officially identified and given a scientific name (Scheffers et al., 2012), so it is likely that many taxa will become extinct before their status is known (Eggleton, 2020). Increasing yearly predictions of biodiversity loss indicate that we are approaching the world’s sixth mass extinction (Raven and Miller, 2020). The incomplete record of our current census of life referred to as the “Linnean deficit” (Raven and Wilson, 1992), is particularly acute in the most diverse but least studied groups, such as small insects, and in an area that is highly diverse such as the tropics (Delabye et al., 2019; López-Vaamonde et al., 2019).

Increasing use of genetic tools for species discovery has shown that the scarcity is greater than previously thought, with the frequent discovery of assemblages of two or more cryptic species that have been misclassified as a single taxon due to their morphological similarities. DNA barcoding, a species identification tool based on the use of a single standard DNA marker (part of the mtDNA COI gene; Hebert et al., 2003), has contributed to the discovery of many new species. Among these are the most studied and documented groups of organisms (Hrbek et al., 2014). Some of these new species are cryptic, rare, and valuable for conservation; Assessing the level of enigmatic diversity and identifying hotspots should be a conservation priority (Bickford et al., 2007).

Objective

1) To identify primers to be used in DNA barcoding approach

2) To familiarize students in using NCBI Genbank Database

3) To evaluate steps in designing a good PCR primer