This is a very interesting paper! Here we add to the global availability of barcoded, culturable marine-derived fungi useful for biodiscovery and detailed future genomic and physiological studies. Most importantly, we expose an immense micro-word of marine
fungi characterized by virtually unlimited levels of diversity (and I can explain why).
From a technical perspective though, this paper demonstrates the amount of bias and confusion an ordinary biodiversity survey can carry forward and introduce into public databases simply because of improper use of sequence alignment algorithms and genetic distance corrections. We have tested the performance of the automatic barcode gap finder (ABGD) method and its accuracy and comparability of estimating Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) against combinations of commonly used alignment algorithms (such as CLUSTAL, KALIGN, MUSCLE and MUFFT) and commonly used genetic distance measures (such as p-distance, K2P correction and the General Time reversible model). Well, in algorithmic OTU delineation, there are big differences in the number of OTUs delivered by each of the combinations between an alignment algorithm and a genetic distance calculation. IN biodiversity surveys the choice of the algorithm really matters.
