PHE researcher Mark Stoeckle teamed up with Royal Ontario Museum ornithologist Kevin Kerr on a just published PLoS ONE paper “Frequency matrix approach demonstrates high sequence quality in avian BARCODEs and highlights cryptic pseudogenes.” Beginning with the Banbury conferences in 2003, a lot of effort has gone into ensuring the accuracy of DNA barcode databases, both in terms of minimizing sequencing error and having accurate taxonomic labels. How good are the resulting databases? Our paper confirms the high sequence accuracy of the avian BARCODE database (11,000 records), demonstrates significant quality improvement over the past decade, and flags 0.1% of records that are overlooked pseudogenes (which can be viewed as a kind of taxonomic error).