Format: ORAL

Benedikt G. Kuhnhuser1*, Jason Stevenson1, Rowan Schley2, Lszl Csiba1, Sidonie Bellot1, William J. Baker1

1 Royal Botanic Gardens Kew, United Kingdom 2 University of Exeter, United Kingdom * b.kuhnhaeuser@kew.org (Corresponding Author)

DNA barcoding has the potential to enable and speed up plant identification, but traditional barcoding using single to few genes is limited by insufficient discriminatory power in plants. Novel sequencing technologies can routinely generate hundreds of genes even from degraded plant material, promising to overcome the current limitations and unlock a new era of next-generation DNA barcoding. Despite this potential, no barcoding tools exist that can handle dozens or hundreds of genes. To address this methodological gap, we have developed a novel approach to DNA barcoding that can take the information content of hundreds of genes into account. Here, we present our DNA identification toolkit and illustrate its potential to revolutionise plant identification using a case study of rattan furniture authentication. By comparison with traditional barcoding markers, we demonstrate a substantial increase in both accuracy and interpretability of our approach compared to existing methods. The toolkit is publicly and freely available (https://github.com/BenKuhnhaeuser/RattanID).