BMC Bioinformatics BioMed Central Research Open Access Learning to classify species with barcodes Paola Bertolazzi, Giovanni Felici* and Emanuel Weitschek Address: Istituto di Analisi dei Sistemi e Informatica “Antonio Ruberti”, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Viale Manzoni 30, 00185, Rome, Italy E-mail: Paola Bertolazzi -
[email protected]; Giovanni Felici* -
[email protected]; Emanuel Weitschek -
[email protected] *Corresponding author Published: 10 November 2009 BMC Bioinformatics 2009, 10(Suppl 14):S7 doi: 10.1186/1471-2105-10-S14-S7 This article is available from: http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2105/10/S14/S7 Publication of this supplement was made possible thanks to sponsorship from the Encyclopedia of Life and the Consortium for the Barcode of Life. © 2009 Bertolazzi et al; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. Abstract Background: According to many field experts, specimens classification based on morphological keys needs to be supported with automated techniques based on the analysis of DNA fragments. The most successful results in this area are those obtained from a particular fragment of mitochondrial DNA, the gene cytochrome c oxidase I (COI) (the “barcode”). Since 2004 the Consortium for the Barcode of Life (CBOL) promotes the collection of barcode specimens and the development of methods to analyze the barcode for several tasks, among which the identification of rules to correctly classify an individual into its species by reading its barcode.