Original title: Environmental DNA metabarcoding: Transforming how we survey animal and plant communities
Animals and plants leave traces of DNA in places like water and soil. Researchers collect these traces and use high-throughput sequencing, which reads many DNA fragments quickly. They match the fragments to species names; this process is called eDNA metabarcodingMatching many DNA fragments from a sample to species names.. It can help estimate which species are present, but the paper says estimating their relative abundanceHow many individuals of one species there are compared with other species. is challenging.
Imagine checking a kitchen after a busy shared meal. Crumbs and spills can tell you which foods were there, but they do not reliably tell you how much of each food people ate. In this paper, traces left in nature stand in for the crumbs, and matching those traces to species helps reveal which kinds were present, not reliably how many there were.
Surveying animals and plants by direct observation can miss species or disturb them. Environmental DNA metabarcoding offers ecologists and conservation workers a way to estimate which species are present from environmental samples, while the paper explains why estimating how many of each species is harder.
The review describes eDNA metabarcoding as useful for surveying species richness, but says that estimating relative abundance remains challenging. The abstract does not report a single accuracy level or establish that any sample type works equally well across environments, places, and times.
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Environmental DNA metabarcoding: Transforming how we survey animal and plant communities — Kristy Deiner, Holly M. Bik, Elvira Mächler et al. — Molecular Ecology — doi:10.1111/mec.14350
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.