Background#R##N#DNA barcoding technology, which uses a short piece of DNA sequence to identify species, has wide ranges of applications. Until today, a universal DNA barcode marker for plants remains elusive. The rbc L and mat K regions have been proposed as the “core barcode” for plants and the ITS2 and psbA-trnH intergenic spacer (PTIGS) regions were later added as supplemental barcodes. The use of PTIGS region as a supplemental barcode has been limited by the lack of computational tools that can handle significant insertions and deletions in the PTIGS sequences. Here, we compared the most commonly used alignment-based and alignment-free methods and developed a web server to allow the biologists to carry out PTIGS-based DNA barcoding analyses.
['Chang Liu', 'Dong Liang', 'Ting Gao', 'Xiaohui Pang', 'Jingyuan Song', 'Hui Yao', 'Jianping Han', 'Zhihua Liu', 'Xiaojun Guan', 'Kun Jiang', 'Huan Li', 'Shilin Chen']
PTIGS-IdIt, a system for species identification by DNA sequences of the psbA-trnH intergenic spacer region