Bryophytes are excellent candidates for DNA barcoding, as they are often overlooked and can be difficult to identify due to their diminutive size, with cryptic diversity being common.
We have been building a DNA barcoding reference library of British and Irish bryophyte species, initially focusing on the ~300 native liverwort species (and 4 hornworts), and more recently expanding our focus to include the ~800 moss species. We have extracted DNA for barcoding from over 3,000 bryophyte accessions, representing most of our known liverwort and hornwort taxa, and over half of our known moss species. Not all of these samples are from Britain and Ireland – where material is scarce, or taxonomic problems might be solved with plants from other parts of the world, or where we wanted to confirm the usage of names across a wider geographic area, we have samples from further afield.
While the majority of this project involves the routine generation of DNA sequence data to act as barcode references, new scientific discoveries have been made during the course of the work.
