March, 2023
Details
Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding is often considered a qualitative tool best suited for presence/absence surveys. In this update, we present evidence that adding a DNA standard to metabarcoding PCRs quantifies
Details
Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding is often considered a qualitative tool best suited for presence/absence surveys. In this update, we present evidence that adding a DNA standard to metabarcoding PCRs quantifies marine bony fish eDNA over a wide range of copies per reaction. With Riaz 12S primers, we do not find significant PCR bias among teleost species. In New Jersey trawl water samples, converting eDNA reads to copies improved correlation with trawl biomass. Our findings support incorporating a DNA standard in 12S metabarcoding. We extend discussions in other seminars in this series about eDNA rarity as a major challenge and show ways to help overcome the rarity problem. We also highlight how allometric scaling of biomass and a new software tool for it can improve eDNA correlation and briefly explore potential applications of eDNA data to ecosystem mapping. We conclude with promising early applications.
Time
Wednesday, March 1 - 12:00pm 2023 - Wednesday, March 1 - 1:00pm 2023
Organizer
NOAA