With species around the world disappearing faster than biologists can identify them, many scientists pinned their hopes on DNA barcoding, a recently proposed strategy that treats a short fragment of DNA as a sort of universal product code to identify species.
But this approach generated controversy from the start, with skeptics bristling at the notion that a single gene fragment could perform such a tall task.
In a new study published in PLoS Biology, Christopher Meyer and Gustav Paulay revisit the issue with a diverse, extensively studied snail group, the ubiquitous, tropical marine cowries whose shell can command over $30,000. Meyer and Paulay found that while the barcode worked well for identifying specimens in highly characterized groups, it was much more error prone when used to discover novel species.