A Genomic Blueprint for the Description of Thousands of New Species

Despite over 260 years of taxonomic research, only a small fraction of species have been scientifically named and described, rendering humans largely illiterate with respect to the biological diversity that surrounds us. Since past research has mostly focused on relatively species-poor groups of organisms, the remaining components of biodiversity, often referred to as ‘dark taxa’, are more difficult to elucidate. In the midst of the biodiversity crisis and high extinction rates, we must accelerate the taxonomic workflow in a radical way.

As all taxonomically relevant information is encoded in an organism’s DNA, taxonomy based on genomics can provide a superior method of species delimitation and enable a rapid, automated and reproducible reference system. Recently, other proposals have emerged to overcome the taxonomy crisis. The ‘minimalistic approach’ proposed rapid description of species based on DNA barcodes associated with minimalistic morphological evidence. The Large-Scale Integrative Taxonomy proposal suggested validating the barcode clusters based on morphology or other sources of evidence.

By taking advantage of rapid progress in high-throughput sequencing technologies, this proposed project focuses on finding answers to questions that must be solved to understand species diversity globally. We will first focus on re-configurating the minimalistic approach to become more scientifically rigorous and demonstrate that the approach can revolutionize taxonomy by speeding up species descriptions in an unprecedented manner. Secondly, we will demonstrate the feasibility of the new protocol in practice by describing and naming ca 20,000 tropical species of gall midges (Cecidomyiidae), an achievement that is likely to garner much scientific interest.

Our project proposes innovative solutions that will have implications for all types of biodiversity research. Since the proposed approach is novel, the research will be truly groundbreaking and will establish a model for future research. Our project has the potential to generate scientific breakthroughs in two areas. First, we will show that understanding species diversity of ‘dark’, massively diverse groups is possible with the adoption of high-throughput genomic tools. Second, we will significantly accelerate species delimitations and descriptions of a massive taxon, based on state-of-the-art high-throughput tools, while providing a template for other researchers to replicate our methods for other taxa.