The concern the reviewer mentions here was also one of our main conclusions for the article. Apparently we did not formulate it well enough. It has thus been reformulated to: “However an accurate taxonomy can never be achieved by the use of a barcoding method only, since it is based on nucleotide substitutions of a single gene. Accurate classification always requires an integrative taxonomy effort R2 including characteristics from ecology, morphology and physiology, as already previously suggested for prokaryotes [9,28,29,45], and as it is becoming common also for animal taxonomy (e.g., [53,54]).” Moreover, it is necessary to mention the following aspects of this manuscript: (1)
The manuscript of Eckert et al., submitted into the journal Life, concerns in principle again only one, but very important genetic criterion for evaluation of prokaryotic diversity. It should be a serious part of this complex evaluation. It is very important and useful and publication of the article is surely recommendable. However, the connection, coincidences and relations to other criteria should be better expressed.