Metabarcoding on the deep seafloor: optimizing multigene approaches and sampling methods for large-scale biodiversity assessments.
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biodiversity, Marine Biology, Biological Oceanography
- Keywords
- Biodiversity, Deep-sea, metabarcoding, environmental DNA, meiofauna
- Copyright
- © 2018 Brandt et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2018. Metabarcoding on the deep seafloor: optimizing multigene approaches and sampling methods for large-scale biodiversity assessments. PeerJ Preprints 6:e26820v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.26820v1
Abstract
The deep sea, the largest and most poorly known biome on Earth, is under increasing threat from human-induced ecological impacts. Improved baseline knowledge and environmental impact assessment protocols are required to be able to alleviate potential changes in ecosystem diversity and functioning in the deep-sea. Metabarcoding of environmental DNA (eDNA) enables broader and faster biodiversity assessments, and is increasingly used to study eukaryote and prokaryote diversity. Whether metabarcoding provides reliable diversity inventories that meet the quality standards for accurate baseline data and biomonitoring is still uncertain in the deep-sea benthos, the latter being associated with specific taxonomic and sampling challenges. In particular, it is crucial to develop multigene metabarcoding protocols targeting living organisms and not extracellular, archived DNA. Before launching a large-scale project for the reassessment of deep-sea biodiversity, we addressed these technical challenges using bathyal and abyssal sediments sampled in the Mediterranean and central Atlantic. Our aim was to setup optimized protocols and evaluate the strengths and limitations of multigene metabarcoding in the deep sea by 1) comparing eDNA-based with traditional morphology-based diversity inventories and 2) assessing the accuracy and/or bias associated with distinct sample processing methods, including RNA and size-selected DNA extracts lacking short (extracellular) DNA fragments.
Author Comment
This is an abstract which has been accepted for the WCMB 2018