DNA barcoding of a complex genus, <i>Aesculus</i> L. (Sapindaceae) reveals lack of species-level resolution
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Aesculus L. is a small genus of horticulturally important trees and shrubs, comprising 13–19 species. Frequent hybridization among species, particularly in cultivation, has contributed to taxonomic confusion and difficulties in the identification of plants. In this study, we evaluated three widely employed plant DNA barcode loci, matK, and the entire ITS region (ITS1+5.8S+ITS2) as well as subunit ITS2 for 50 individuals representing 13 species of Aesculus, excluding only A. wangii (=A. assamica). In contrast to the plastid matK region, both the ITS and ITS2 loci displayed low levels of species discrimination, especially in our “first hit” BLASTn searches. We also presented the phylogeny of Aesculus based on matK and the entire ITS region, with additional matK and ITS sequences from GenBank. Our results show that Aesculus chinensis, A. flava, A. glabra, A. pavia, and A. sylvatica are probably not monophyletic. Furthermore, with the widest taxon coverage until now, the current study highlights the importance of sampling multiple individuals, not only for DNA barcoding, but also for phylogenetic studies.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".