This seminar is part of the NOAA 'Omics Seminar Series, which takes place on the third Wednesday of every month. 'Omics describes a suite of cutting-edge tools used to analyze DNA, RNA, proteins, or metabolites.

Date: March 1, 2023

Title: Marine fish eDNA Metabarcoding: Promising Developments and Early Applications

Speakers: Mark Stoeckle & Jesse Ausubel

Abstract: Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding is often considered a qualitative tool best suited for presence/absence surveys. In this update, we present evidence that adding a DNA standard to metabarcoding PCRs quantifies marine bony fish eDNA over a wide range of copies per reaction. With Riaz 12S primers, we do not find significant PCR bias among teleost species. In New Jersey trawl water samples, converting eDNA reads to copies improved correlation with trawl biomass. Our findings support incorporating a DNA standard in 12S metabarcoding. We extend discussions in other seminars in this series about eDNA rarity as a major challenge and show ways to help overcome the rarity problem. We also highlight how allometric scaling of biomass and a new software tool for it can improve eDNA correlation and briefly explore potential applications of eDNA data to ecosystem mapping. We conclude with promising early applications.