Species determination incl. DNA methodology

Description

Metabarcoding of soil eDNA holds great promise for the assessment of soil biodiversity, as the assessment is threatened by unavailable taxonomic expertise and costly sample processing and identification. However, we still need to develop, validate and test the metabarcoding approach against the conventional methodology and integrate it in our soil biodiversity studies. I will go through all the steps of the metabarcoding approach, the currently most common way to assess biodiversity through DNA sources. Our experiences now cover soil microarthropods, enchytraeids and earthworms; however, to arrive at standardized agreed ways of employing metabarcoding, we still need to decide on appropriate primers, DNA extraction method, soil sample size and replication. Although reference databases are crucial for the assignment of species names to DNA sequences we could still accept a smaller component of OTUs, which will be resolved in the future, as international open databases constantly are being populated with more barcodes. This involve the bioinformatics step relying on a proper clean-up of DNA sequence errors and statistic tools to cluster the sequences into taxonomic units. To arrive at ecologically relevant conclusions species name assignments is crucial. Taxonomic identity is needed to input biodiversity data into trait based-analyses intended for prediction of changes in ecosystem function and soil ecosystem services.

Period	19 Nov 2019
Event title	14th SETAC Europe Special Science Symposium: Soil Biodiversity: what do we know and how to protect it from adverse effects of plant protection products and other chemicals
Event type	Conference
Conference number	14
Location	Bruxelles, BelgiumShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International