2012). That said, with the currently used sequencing and analysis methods, DNA taxonomy is not a silver bullet. Recent speciation events may be hard to detect selleck products reliably with the most commonly used markers, and with single-marker approaches in general due to effects of lineage sorting and introgression (Mattio and Payri 2010, Neiva et al. 2010, Zardi et al.

2011). However, with the improvements in sequencing technologies that we are experiencing, one can soon expect a shift from single-marker to multimarker approaches, which will drastically improve our ability to distinguish between closely related species, hopefully even in the face of hybridization (e.g., Zardi et al. 2011). Leliaert et al. (2014) provide a review of DNA-based species delimitation in phycology. Even after DNA sequencing takes central stage in species delimitation, morphological characterization Erlotinib cost of species will remain

a critical task. Features like shape, size, and color will remain our first visual point of access to the algae we study and our first clue to their identity for the time to come. Algal morphology is of great ecological relevance, as is illustrated by the body of work on algal functional morphology as well as the various references to morphological plasticity made in this paper and elsewhere. It also serves as a key feature in research into functional genomics and physiology, and we need to characterize it to understand the evolutionary dynamics 上海皓元医药股份有限公司 of algal shapes and their functionality. In species-level taxonomy, morphological features are increasingly being used

as secondary defining features, after more reliable features have been used to define species boundaries. Should DNA sequences suggest that there are multiple species in a set of samples, the logical next step is to search for morphological clues that support or contradict this hypothesis. This approach, which is sometimes called “molecular-assisted alpha taxonomy” or “reverse taxonomy,” has been widely adopted and is hugely successful in algal taxonomy. As part of this approach, morphological features will also continue to play a major role in nomenclature, more specifically in the process of fitting old names into modern, DNA-based taxonomies. As is evident from the simulations presented here, this process will often involve dealing with uncertainty because not all species will have unique morphologies. And rather than letting this uncertainty grind algal taxonomy to a standstill, we should be pragmatic in making educated decisions in the face of uncertainty to move algal taxonomy forward. All of this relates back to the revision of the C. racemosa–peltata complex in a very direct way.