3. DNA barcoding to identify and certify food raw material The identification of organisms is fundamental to ensure high quality standards for the food industry and market (Myers, 2011;Novak, Gruber-Gréger, & Lukas, 2007). DNA barcoding is effective in certifying both origin and quality of raw materials, and to detect adulterations (e.g. by mixing products from different taxa) occurring in the industrial food chain. However, its performance is strongly influenced by the molecular variability of the organisms, and a high level of resolution is achieved when an organism has low intraspecific polymorphism, making it well distinguishable from closely related taxa (Casiraghi et al., 2010; Hebert et al., 2003). Another critical element can be the availability of high quality repositories of reference sequences. For this reason, a high number of DNA barcode sequences from animals and plants (including farmed species) have been submitted during the last 10 years to both NCBI and BOLD databases (www.barcodeoflife.org), following the guidelines provided by the Database Working Group (http://barcoding.si.edu/PDF/DWG_data_standards-Final.pdf).