New release of trnL-P6 reference data for Mpala Research Centre

Plant DNA Barcode Library for Mpala Research Centre

For more than 13 years, we have built and maintained a plant DNA Barcode library for the flora of Mpala Research Centre in Kenya. Many versions have been released, the most substantial of which was associated withe 2019 publication of the Plant DNA-barcode library and community phylogeny for a semi-arid East African savanna in Molecular Ecology. This post is intended to help you track significant developments in this long-term collaborative effort and find the most current version to use in your analyses.

The Mpala plant DNA barcode project emerges from a long-term collaboration between Mpala Research Centre, The East African Herbarium, National Museums of Kenya, the Smithsonian Institution, Princeton University, and Brown University. 


To maintain open access to the plant DNA barcode data repository from Mpala, we use the Barcode of Life Datasystems Portal at boldsystems.org. The most up-to-date data associated with this project can be found through this portal under the project name "UHURU."


We are grateful to the Government of Kenya for permission to conduct this research. We are especially grateful to Sam Kurukura, Ali Hassan, Peter Lokeny, and Dr. Paul Musili for the painstaking efforts required to archive and identify these invaluable research specimens. 
The first data release from this library, accompanied the first publication of our dietary DNA metabarcoding study at Mpala (Kartzinel et al. 2015, PNAS), which is archived on here on Dryad (together with other datasets presented in that study).


You can freely download the bioinformatics workflow that we use to convert these barcodes into a reference library suitable for use in bioinformatic pipelines designed for dietary DNA metabarcoding on the Software and Data page of the Kartzinel Lab website. Our pipelines are typically designed to use the Obitools software, but versions of these data have been created for dada2, Mothur, Qiime and others.