DNA metabarcoding for high-throughput monitoring of estuarine macrobenthic communities.

ABSTRACT: Morphology-based profiling of benthic communities has been extensively applied to aquatic ecosystems' health assessment. However, it remains a low-throughput, and sometimes ambiguous, procedure. Despite DNA metabarcoding has been applied to marine benthos, a comprehensive approach providing species-level identifications for estuarine macrobenthos is still lacking. Here we report a combination of experimental and field studies to assess the aptitude of COI metabarcoding to provide robust species-level identifications for high-throughput monitoring of estuarine macrobenthos. To investigate the ability of metabarcoding to detect all species present in bulk DNA extracts, we contrived three phylogenetically diverse communities, and applied four different primer pairs to generate PCR products wi

SUBMITTER: Lobo J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5688171 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature