ExcaliBAR: a simple and fast software utility to calculate intra- and interspecific distances from DNA barcodes

In the context of DNA Barcoding, sequences of standard marker genesfor thousands and potentially millions of individuals and species are becoming available, requiring ever more efficient bioinformatic environments and software algorithms for analysis. We here present ExcaliBAR (Extraction, Calculation, Barcoding), a user-friendly software utility to facilitate one important initial step in DNA barcodinganalyses, namely the determination of the barcodinggap between pairwise genetic distancesamong and within species, based on original distance matrices computed by MEGAsoftware. In addition, the software is able to renamesequences downloaded via the standard user interfaces of public databases such as GenBank, without the need of developing and applying specific scripts for this purpose.