Starting aDNAbarcode reference library for shallow water polychaetes from the southern European Atlantic coast

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Abstract
Annelid polychaetes have been seldom the focus of dedicatedDNAbarcoding studies, despite their ecological relevance and often dominance, particularly in soft‐bottom estuarine and coastal marine ecosystems. Here, we report the first assessment of the performance ofDNAbarcodes in the discrimination of shallow water polychaete species from the southern European Atlantic coast, focusing on specimens collected in estuaries and coastal ecosystems of Portugal. We analysed cytochrome oxidase IDNAbarcodes (COI‐5P) from 164 specimens, which were assigned to 51 morphospecies. To our data set from Portugal, we added available published sequences selected from the same species, genus or family, to inspect for taxonomic congruence among studies and collection location. The final data set comprised 290 specimens and 79 morphospecies, which generated 99 Barcode Index Numbers (BINs) within Barcode of Life Data Systems (BOLD). Among these, 22BINs were singletons, 47 otherBINs were concordant, confirming the initial identification based on morphological characters, and 30 were discordant, most of which consisted on multipleBINs found for the same morphospecies. Some of the most prominent cases in the latter category includeHediste diversicolor(O.F. Müller, 1776) (7),Eulalia viridis(Linnaeus, 1767) (2) andOwenia fusiformis (delle Chiaje, 1844) (5), all of them reported from Portugal and frequently used in ecological studies as environmental quality indicators. Our results for these species showed discordance between molecular lineages and morphospecies, or added additional relatively divergent lineages. The potential inaccuracies in environmental assessments, where underpinning polychaete species diversity is poorly resolved or clarified, demand additional and extensive investigation of theDNAbarcode diversity in this group, in parallel with alpha taxonomy efforts.
Funding Information
  • FEDER
  • Ontario Genomics Institute
  • Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada

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