PAST WORK
Prior mt DNA Data
By August 2002, the NCBI database contained nearly 90,000 entries for animal mitochondrial genes. The following summary indicates that cyt b and COI have been the most intensively studied of the 13 protein-coding genes in the mitochondrial genome. Although twice as many sequences are available for cyt b as for COI, nearly 90% of them derive from chordates. By contrast, the COI sequences provide broad taxonomic coverage, reflecting the availability of primers for this gene which enable its recovery from most animal groups. This ability to recover DNA from animals-at-large indicates that COI satisfies one of the key design criteria in the selection of a gene that could serve as the basis for a microgenomic identification system.