Environmental DNA can act as a biodiversity barometer of anthropogenic pressures in coastal ecosystems.

ABSTRACT: Loss of biodiversity from lower to upper trophic levels reduces overall productivity and stability of coastal ecosystems in our oceans, but rarely are these changes documented across both time and space. The characterisation of environmental DNA (eDNA) from sediment and seawater using metabarcoding offers a powerful molecular lens to observe marine biota and provides a series of 'snapshots' across a broad spectrum of eukaryotic organisms. Using these next-generation tools and downstream analytical innovations including machine learning sequence assignment algorithms and co-occurrence network analyses, we examined how anthropogenic pressures may have impacted marine biodiversity on subtropical coral reefs in Okinawa, Japan. Based on 18 S ribosomal RNA, but not ITS2 sequence data due to inco

SUBMITTER: DiBattista JD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7239923 | biostudies-literature | 2020 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature