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The 6th International Barcode of Life Conference (Guelph, Canada, 18-21 August 2015), themed Barcodes to Biomes, showcases the latest developments in DNA barcoding research and its diverse applications. The meeting also provides a venue for a global research community to share ideas and to initiate collaborations. All plenary and contributed abstracts are being published as an open-access special issue of Genome. Here, I use a comparison with the 3rd Conference (Mexico City, 2009) to highlight 10 recent and emerging trends that are apparent among the contributed abstracts. One of the outstanding trends is the rising proportion of abstracts that focus upon multiple socio-economically important applications of DNA barcoding, including studies of agricultural pests, quarantine and invasive species, wildlife forensics, disease vectors, biomonitoring of ecosystem health, and marketplace surveys evaluating the authenticity of seafood products and medicinal plants. Other key movements include the use of barcoding and metabarcoding approaches for dietary analyses--and for studies of food webs spanning three or more trophic levels--as well as the spread of next-generation sequencing methods in multiple contexts. In combination with the rising taxonomic and geographic scope of many barcoding iniatives, these developments suggest that several important questions in biology are becoming tractable. "What is this specimen on an agricultural shipment?", "Who eats whom in this whole food web?", and even "How many species are there?" are questions that may be answered in time periods ranging from a few years to one or a few decades. The next phases of DNA barcoding may expand yet further into prediction of community shifts with climate change and improved management of biological resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The old Portuguese wheat landrace aggregate known as 'Barbela' shows good productivity under the low-fertility conditions often associated with acid soils. The use of genomic rye DNA, in combination with 45S rDNA and the repetitive sequences dpTa1 and pSc119.2 as probes, in two sequential in situ hybridization steps enabled the identification of all chromosomes in the 'Barbela' wheat lines and the detection of the introgression of rye-origin chromatin onto wheat chromosome arm 2DL in two of the lines. Amplification of microsatellite loci using published primer pairs showed that the distal segment of wheat chromosome 2DL, which was involved in the rye translocation, was deleted. The identification and characterization of small recombinant chromosome segments in wheat–rye lines may allow their use in plant breeding programmes. Their presence in farmer-maintained material demonstrates the importance of maintaining, characterizing, and collecting landrace material before valuable genetic combinations are lost as uniform commercial crops are introduced.Key words: biodiversity, in situ hybridization, microsatellites, plant breeding, recombination, alien chromosomes, marker selection.La vieille variété de pays amalgamée d'origine portugaise connue sous le nom de 'Barbela' montre une bonne productivité en conditions de faible fertilité, lesquelles sont souvent rencontrées dans des sols acides. L'emploi comme sondes de l'ADN génomique du seigle en combinaison avec l'ADNr 45S et les séquences répétitives dpTa1 ainsi que pSc119.2, lors d'hybridations in situ séquentielles, a permis d'identifier tous les chromosomes au sein des lignées du blé 'Barbela' et la détection d'une introgression de chromatine provenant du seigle au sein du bras chromosomique 2DL chez deux des lignées. L'amplification de microsatellites à l'aide d'amorces déjà caractérisées a montré que le segment distal du chromosome 2DL, celui impliqué dans la translocation avec le seigle, a été délété. L'identification et la caractérisation de courts segments chromosomiques recombinants dans des lignées blé–seigle pourraient ouvrir la voie à leur utilisation dans des programmes de sélection. Leur présence au sein de lignées retenues par les agriculteurs démontre l'importance du maintien, de la caractérisation et de la collection de variétés de pays avant que ne soient perdues des combinaisons génétiques de valeur avec l'introduction de cultures commerciales uniformes.Mots clés : biodiversité, hybridation in situ, microsatellite, amélioration génétique, recombinaison, chromosomes étrangers, sélection de marqueurs[Traduit par la Rédaction] [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]