The importance of standardization for biodiversity comparisons: A case study using autonomous reef monitoring structures (ARMS) and metabarcoding to measure cryptic diversity on Mo'orea coral reefs, French Polynesia.

ABSTRACT: The advancement of metabarcoding techniques, declining costs of high-throughput sequencing and development of systematic sampling devices, such as autonomous reef monitoring structures (ARMS), have provided the means to gather a vast amount of diversity data from cryptic marine communities. However, such increased capability could also lead to analytical challenges if the methods used to examine these communities across local and global scales are not standardized. Here we compare and assess the underlying biases of four ARMS field processing methods, preservation media, and current bioinformatic pipelines in evaluating diversity from cytochrome c oxidase I metabarcoding data. Illustrating the ability of ARMS-based metabarcoding to capture a wide spectrum of biodiversity, 3,372 OTUs and tw

SUBMITTER: Ransome E 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5400227 | biostudies-literature | 2017

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature