DNA barcoding is a molecular tool that uses a standardized DNA region to identify species. Our preliminary study reported here is the first attempt to specifically focus on universality and attributes of candidate barcodes across a wide systematic range of mosses. We tested eight previously proposed plant barcoding regions (atpF-atpH, ITS2, matK, psbK-psbI, rbcL, rpoB, rpoC1, trnH-psbA) and two popular phylogenetic markers (rps4 and trnL-trnF of cpDNA) in 49 moss species and 9 liverwort species,