Taxonomic identification accuracy from BOLD and GenBank databases using over a thousand insect DNA barcodes from Colombia.Recent declines of insect populations at high rates have resulted in the need to develop a quick method to determine their diversity and to process massive data for the identification of species of highly diverse groups.  Here we aim to assess the accuracy in identification of insect taxonomic categories from two repositories, BOLD Systems and GenBank.  Overall, BOLD systems outperformed GenBank, and the performance of both engines differed by orders and other taxonomic categories (species, genus and family).  The accuracy was higher in BOLD for the order Coleoptera at family level, for Coleoptera and Lepidoptera at genus and species level.  Moreover, the Scarabaeinae subset showed that species were correctly identified only when BOLD match percentage was above 93.4% and a total of 85% of the samples were correctly assigned to a taxonomic category.  These results accentuate the great potential of the identification engines to place insects accurately into their respective taxonomic categories based on DNA barcodes and highlight the reliability of BOLD Systems for insect identification in the absence of a large reference database for a highly diverse country.
BOLD
Taxonomic identification accuracy from BOLD and GenBank databases using over a thousand insect DNA barcodes from Colombia.Recent declines of insect populations at high rates have resulted in the need to develop a quick method to determine their diversity and to process massive data for the identification of species of highly diverse groups.  Here we aim to assess the accuracy in identification of insect taxonomic categories from two repositories, BOLD Systems and GenBank.  Overall, BOLD systems outperformed GenBank, and the performance of both engines differed by orders and other taxonomic categories (species, genus and family). 
GenBank
A short sequence of DNA from COI is widely used for insect identification by comparing it against sequences of known species.  We used 1,160 COI sequences representing eight orders of insects from Colombia. 
COI
Taxonomic identification accuracy from BOLD and GenBank databases using over a thousand insect DNA barcodes from Colombia.Recent declines of insect populations at high rates have resulted in the need to develop a quick method to determine their diversity and to process massive data for the identification of species of highly diverse groups.  These results accentuate the great potential of the identification engines to place insects accurately into their respective taxonomic categories based on DNA barcodes and highlight the reliability of BOLD Systems for insect identification in the absence of a large reference database for a highly diverse country.
DNA barcodes
Taxonomic identification accuracy from BOLD and GenBank databases using over a thousand insect DNA barcodes from Colombia.Recent declines of insect populations at high rates have resulted in the need to develop a quick method to determine their diversity and to process massive data for the identification of species of highly diverse groups.  We used 1,160 COI sequences representing eight orders of insects from Colombia. 
Colombia