 The article discusses the use of DNA barcoding for assessing biodiversity in both taxonomic and environmental studies. Several DNA regions have been proposed as barcodes, but formal comparisons between them are limited. A new bioinformatic tool has been developed to evaluate barcode quality based on in silico PCR over large databases. The article compares the taxonomic coverage and resolution of several DNA regions already proposed for vertebrates and shows that barcodes based on highly degenerated primers have the highest coverage. In silico PCR could be used to improve the performance of a study by allowing the preliminary comparison of several DNA regions in order to identify the most appropriate barcode depending on the study aims. This article was authored by Schezad Waseem, Riaz Tiiba, Zandal Stephanie, and others. We are article.tv, links in the description below.