论文部分内容阅读
The application of molecular tools for the identification of strains, populations and species has become a common practice in a variety of applied and basic investigations in many parts of the world. However, standardization of such applications varies widely among organisms and scientific fields. In this mini-review, the author provides a brief introduction to one of the most prominent effort for species identification - the intational barcode of life (iBOL) project, discusses the features of fungal diversity including the proposed fungal barcode DNA fragment-the intergenic spacer regions (ITS) of the nuclear ribosomal RNA gene clusters, and illustrates the potential promises and problems of using ITS for barcoding and for analyzing the phylogeographic patt of the wild gourmet mushroom Tricholoma matsutake species complex. The analyses show that identification to species level is often insufficient for practical applications and that sequences from multiple genes in combination with critical morphological and physiological evaluations are needed to identify strains, populations and species.