Progress

The common idea of all barcoding initiatives in the world should be to create publicly available sequence data, usable for both scientific purposes and practice. In fact, much of the barcodes remains private, since the authors want to protect the results of their efforts prior its publishing. The data produced by AquaBOL.SK is still largely non-public, but we publish it on an ongoing basis and our effort is to make it freely available as soon as possible. However, if you are interested in accessing our data, please contact us.

AquaBOL.SK follows the generally established standards for DNA barcodeing accepted by all contributors. All steps taken during the acquisition of DNA barcodes (giant material, metadata, document material, DNA analysis, data evaluation, data entry into the BOLD database) are performed in accordance with the International Barcode of Life (iBOL) guidelines and requirements: DNA barcode sequences they are generated from predetermined organisms (if possible); sequenced specimens are photographed and stored in a collection; the remaining DNA is stored in a collection of DNA isolates; sequences and corresponding metadata are inserted into the BOLD database. All BOLD barcodes related to AquaBOL.SK are marked with the “SKBAF” mark.
AquaBOL.SK is committed to maintaining high standards and producing high quality and reliable data for further research and application in practice.

Still a lot of … Sequences of many species of organisms with occurrence also in the territory of Slovakia are already in the BOLD database and they significantly help with the identification of “our” species, but the samples come mostly from other countries. However, to fulfil the idea of DNA barcoding in practice or further research, it is necessary to recognize and quantify the local and intraspecific genetic diversity of individual species, not to mention potential cryptic diversity, endemic species, etc. Many species do not yet have their records in the database. So far, the number of sequences gained from organisms collected in Slovakia is terribly low in the database (according to an analysis from 2018, the BOLD database covered only about 4% of freshwater invertebrates from Slovakia).