Large-Scale Monitoring of Plants through Environmental DNA Metabarcoding of Soil: Recovery, Resolution, and Annotation of Four DNA Markers.

ABSTRACT: In a rapidly changing world we need methods to efficiently assess biodiversity in order to monitor ecosystem trends. Ecological monitoring often uses plant community composition to infer quality of sites but conventional aboveground surveys only capture a snapshot of the actively growing plant diversity. Environmental DNA (eDNA) extracted from soil samples, however, can include taxa represented by both active and dormant tissues, seeds, pollen, and detritus. Analysis of this eDNA through DNA metabarcoding provides a more comprehensive view of plant diversity at a site from a single assessment but it is not clear which DNA markers are best used to capture this diversity. Sequence recovery, annotation, and sequence resolution among taxa were evaluated for four established DNA markers (matK,

SUBMITTER: Fahner NA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4911152 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature