Only a fraction of species found so far has been described, particularly cryptic species uncovered by molecular data. The latter might require the use of molecular data for its diagnosis, but it is important to make use of the diagnostic content of the molecular data itself. The molecular character‐based model provides discrete molecular diagnostic characters within DNA sequences that can be used in species descriptions fulfilling the requirement of most codes of nomenclature for a character‐based description of species. Here, we introduce fastachar, a software developed to extract molecular diagnostic characters from one or several taxonomically informative DNA markers of a selected taxon compared with those of other taxa in a single step. The input data consist of a single file with aligned sequences in the fasta format, which can be created using alignment software such as mega or geneious. fastachar is an easy‐to‐use software with a graphical interface. Thus, the software does not require the user to have any knowledge of the underlying programming environment (Python). We hope this software, based on the method proposed by Jörger and Schrödl (Frontiers in Zoology, 10, 59, 2013) to describe cryptic species, will encourage researchers to take the final step in taxonomy: the formal description of species. We propose the use of this method and fastachar also for the inclusion of molecular data in the description of any species. fastachar is released as open‐source software under GNU General Public License V3 and is freely available for all major operating systems from https://github.com/smerckel/FastaChar.

中文翻译：

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让每个物种都计数：FastaChar 软件用于快速确定分子诊断特征以描述物种。

迄今为止发现的物种中只有一小部分被描述过，尤其是分子数据发现的神秘物种。后者可能需要使用分子数据进行诊断，但重要的是利用分子数据本身的诊断内容。基于分子特征的模型在 DNA 序列中提供离散的分子诊断特征，可用于物种描述，满足大多数命名法代码对基于特征的物种描述的要求。这里，我们介绍fastachar，一种开发的软件，用于从一个或几个选定分类群的一个或几个分类信息 DNA 标记中提取分子诊断特征，与其他分类群的特征进行比较。输入数据由一个带有 fasta 格式对齐序列的单个文件组成，可以使用诸如mega或geneious 之类的对齐软件创建。法查查尔是一个易于使用的软件，带有图形界面。因此，该软件不需要用户对底层编程环境 (Python) 有任何了解。我们希望该软件基于 Jörger 和 Schrödl (Frontiers in Zoology, 10, 59, 2013) 提出的描述神秘物种的方法，将鼓励研究人员采取分类学的最后一步：物种的正式描述。我们建议使用这种方法和fastachar也将分子数据包含在任何物种的描述中。fastachar在 GNU 通用公共许可证 V3 下作为开源软件发布，可从 https://github.com/smerckel/FastaChar 免费用于所有主要操作系统。