Construction of a New Molecular Barcode for Discriminating Plants and Animals with a Close Genetic Relationship

DNA barcodes have been proposed as a shortcut to provide species identification and as a way to accelerate the discovery of new species. A number of candidate gene regions have been suggested as possible barcodes for animals and plants, but for the identification of recently diverged species and/or varieties with only a few genetic differences it has been reported to be problematic in some cases. This study selected widely cultivated cruciferous vegetables as the primary samples, after failure of discrimination of each species using current DNA barcodes, we performed the fluorescent amplified fragment length polymorphism (F-AFLP) and successfully discriminated each species, subspecies, variety and their cultivar in 74 samples. Then the non-qualitative results obtained from F-AFLP were transformed into two-dimensional barcodes image file of each cultivar via the PDF417 software. This method was also successfully applied to the discrimination of 17 Chinese indigenous pig breeds. The barcode we constructed which greatly reduces the information storage space is genotypes-specific, and can be conveniently decoded into the original data and thereby be conveniently shared and referred to. We believe that it is possible to construct a new data sharing molecular barcode system that could discriminate the subspecies, varieties, cultivars and even individuals with close genetic relationships.