Large-Scale Biomonitoring of Remote and Threatened Ecosystems via High-Throughput Sequencing.

Autor: Joel F Gibson, Shadi Shokralla, Colin Curry, Donald J Baird, Wendy A Monk, Ian King, Mehrdad Hajibabaei
Jazyk: angličtina
Rok vydání: 2015
Předmět:
Zdroj: PLoS ONE, Vol 10, Iss 10, p e0138432 (2015)
Druh dokumentu: article
ISSN: 1932-6203
DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0138432
Popis: Biodiversity metrics are critical for assessment and monitoring of ecosystems threatened by anthropogenic stressors. Existing sorting and identification methods are too expensive and labour-intensive to be scaled up to meet management needs. Alternately, a high-throughput DNA sequencing approach could be used to determine biodiversity metrics from bulk environmental samples collected as part of a large-scale biomonitoring program. Here we show that both morphological and DNA sequence-based analyses are suitable for recovery of individual taxonomic richness, estimation of proportional abundance, and calculation of biodiversity metrics using a set of 24 benthic samples collected in the Peace-Athabasca Delta region of Canada. The high-throughput sequencing approach was able to recover all metrics with a higher degree of taxonomic resolution than morphological analysis. The reduced cost and increased capacity of DNA sequence-based approaches will finally allow environmental monitoring programs to operate at the geographical and temporal scale required by industrial and regulatory end-users.
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