The Barcoding project: development of mass sequencing workflows.

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The determination of species in environmental samples is currently one of the major impediments whenever ecologists want to study biodiversity at species level. It is very difficult, time-consuming, and often expensive to get data from expert taxonomists. DNA-barcoding is therefore a method that will allow a quantum leap in ecological research and conservation biology. However, during the past years we experienced that expert taxonomists hesitate to cooperate in barcoding projects, mainly because they fear to be replaced by machines (though no machine has the biological knowledge of an expert). This is one of the reasons why barcode databases only grow slowly. For Germany, the new GBOL project will pursue the compilation of a database for the German fauna. To circumvent the impediments, we propose to develop workflows for mass sequencing and reverse taxonomy using Diptera from the Exploratories to become more independent of incomplete databases and to improve the cost-efficiency of sample analyses. From our point of view this is the best way to get efficiently data at species level for complex communities.