Systematic review of marine environmental DNA metabarcoding studies: toward best practices for data usability and accessibility.

ABSTRACT: The emerging field of environmental DNA (eDNA) research lacks universal guidelines for ensuring data produced are FAIR-findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable-despite growing awareness of the importance of such practices. In order to better understand these data usability challenges, we systematically reviewed 60 peer reviewed articles conducting a specific subset of eDNA research: metabarcoding studies in marine environments. For each article, we characterized approximately 90 features across several categories: general article attributes and topics, methodological choices, types of metadata included, and availability and storage of sequence data. Analyzing these characteristics, we identified several barriers to data accessibility, including a lack of common context and vocabul

SUBMITTER: Shea MM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10042160 | biostudies-literature | 2023

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature