We agree with the reviewer’s concern. In fact, this is exactly the reason why we chose Cyanobacteria for this analysis. We reformulated this part of the introduction, to make this statement more clear, which now reads: “We choose Cyanobacteria as an example of prokaryotes, not because they are representative for all prokaryotes, but because there is ample phenotypic, ecological, physiological ultrastructural, and biochemical evidence of the existence of independently evolving units in this group [20,21]. Thus, the expectation is that, if a barcoding gap exists in prokaryotes, this should be more easily seen in taxa where groups can be identified also with other methods, as in Cyanobacteria.”
Round 1: and Author Response The authors tested novel approach to identification of species in cyanobacteria based on 16S rRNA based on identification of barcoding gaps previously used in animals.