Keeping it cool: Soil sample cold pack storage and DNA shipment up to 1 month does not impact metabarcoding results.

ABSTRACT: With the advances of sequencing tools, the fields of environmental microbiology and soil ecology have been transformed. Today, the unculturable majority of soil microbes can be sequenced. Although these tools give us tremendous power and open many doors to answer important questions, we must understand how sample processing may impact our results and interpretations. Here, we test the impacts of four soil storage methods on downstream amplicon metabarcoding and qPCR analyses for fungi and bacteria. We further investigate the impact of thaw time on extracted DNA to determine a safe length of time during which this can occur with minimal impact on study results. Overall, we find that storage using standard cold packs with subsequent storage at -20°C is little different than immediate storage

SUBMITTER: Delavaux CS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7297747 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature