How much is enough? Effects of technical and biological replication on metabarcoding dietary analysis

ABSTRACT: DNA metabarcoding is increasingly used in dietary studies to estimate diversity, composition and frequency of occurrence of prey items. However, few studies have assessed how technical and biological replication affect the accuracy of diet estimates. This study addresses these issues using the European free?tailed bat Tadarida teniotis, involving high?throughput sequencing of a small fragment of the COI gene in 15 separate faecal pellets and a 15?pellet pool per each of 20 bats. We investigated how diet descriptors were affected by variability among (a) individuals, (b) pellets of each individual and (c) PCRs of each pellet. In addition, we investigated the impact of (d) analysing separate pellets vs. pellet pools. We found that diet diversity estimates increased steadily with the number o

SUBMITTER: Vanessa A. Mata 

PROVIDER: S-BSST327 | biostudies-other |

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-other