Ecosystem biomonitoring with eDNA: metabarcoding across the tree of life in a tropical marine environment [dataset]
Publication Date
2018
Document Type
Dataset
Publisher
Dryad
School or Research Centre
School of Science / Centre for Marine Ecosystems Research
Description
Effective marine management requires comprehensive data on the status of marine biodiversity. However, efficient methods that can document biodiversity in our oceans are currently lacking. Environmental DNA (eDNA) sourced from seawater offers a new avenue for investigating the biota in marine ecosystems. Here, we investigated the potential of eDNA to inform on the breadth of biodiversity present in a tropical marine environment. Directly sequencing eDNA from seawater using a shotgun approach resulted in only 0.34% of 22.3 million reads assigning to eukaryotes, highlighting the inefficiency of this method for assessing eukaryotic diversity. In contrast, using ‘tree of life’ (ToL) metabarcoding and 20-fold fewer sequencing reads, we could detect 287 families across the major divisions of eukaryotes. Our data also show that the best performing ‘universal’ PCR assay recovered only 44% of the eukaryotes identified across all assays, highlighting the need for multiple metabarcoding assays to catalogue biodiversity. Lastly, focusing on the fish genus Lethrinus, we recovered intra- and inter-specific haplotypes from seawater samples, illustrating that eDNA can be used to explore diversity beyond taxon identifications. Given the sensitivity and low cost of eDNA metabarcoding we advocate this approach be rapidly integrated into biomonitoring programs.
DOI
10.5061/dryad.qq11c
Language
eng
Codes
Usage Notes
18S V1-V3
18S V4
COI
Fish 16S
Crust 16S
Ceph 16S
Mam 16S
Sym 23S
trnL
Prokaryote 16S
File Format(s)
FASTA files
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication 1.0 License.
Citation
Stat, M., Huggett, M. J., Bernasconi, R., DiBattista, J. D., Berry, T. E., Newman, S. J., Harvey, E. S., & Bunce, M. (2018). Ecosystem biomonitoring with eDNA: metabarcoding across the tree of life in a tropical marine environment [dataset]. Dryad. https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.qq11c