Evaluating sediment and water sampling methods for the estimation of deep-sea biodiversity using environmental DNA.

ABSTRACT: Despite representing one of the largest biomes on earth, biodiversity of the deep seafloor is still poorly known. Environmental DNA metabarcoding offers prospects for fast inventories and surveys, yet requires standardized sampling approaches and careful choice of environmental substrate. Here, we aimed to optimize the genetic assessment of prokaryote (16S), protistan (18S V4), and metazoan (18S V1-V2, COI) communities, by evaluating sampling strategies for sediment and aboveground water, deployed simultaneously at one deep-sea site. For sediment, while size-class sorting through sieving had no significant effect on total detected alpha diversity and resolved similar taxonomic compositions at the phylum level for all markers studied, it effectively increased the detection of meiofauna phyl

SUBMITTER: Brandt MI 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8041860 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature