Marine barcoding- how will it help Indian marine benthic studies?

Abstract

DNA barcoding has unraveled issues related to cryptic species complexes, assigning life history stages of unidentified organisms and also towards better understanding of evolutionary relationships between organismal groups. Given the advantages of DNA barcoding, one can strongly argue that barcodes may prove to be extremely useful for marine meiobenthic studies particularly for taxonomic groups such as free-living marine nematodes and polychaetes from the Indian subcontinent. An integrative taxonomic approach based on morphological traits based taxonomy and DNA barcoding would be ideal for studying the meiobenthic groups from Indian sedimentary environments.