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      Short COI markers for freshwater macroinvertebrate metabarcoding

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      Metabarcoding and Metagenomics
      Pensoft Publishers

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          Abstract

          Species diversity of metazoan bulk samples can be rapidly assessed using cytochrome c oxidase I (COI) metabarcoding. However, in some applications often only degraded DNA is available, e.g. from poorly conserved museum specimens, environmental DNA (eDNA) filtered from water or gut content analyses. Here universal primer sets targeting only a short COI fragment are advantageous, as they often can still amplify short DNA fragments. Using PrimerMiner, we optimised two universal primer sets targeting freshwater macroinvertebrates based on NCBI and BOLD reference sequences. The fwh1 and fwh2 primer sets targeting a 178 and 205 bp region were tested in vitro by sequencing previously used freshwater macroinvertebrate mock communities as well as three monitoring samples from Romanian streams of unknown composition. They were further evaluated in silico for their suitability to amplify other insect groups. The fwh1 primer sets showed the most consistent amplification in silico and in vitro, detecting 92% of the taxa present in the mock communities, and allowing clear differentiation between the three macroinvertebrate communities from the Romanian streams. In silico analysis indicates that the short primers are likely to perform well even for non-freshwater insects. Comparing the performance of the new fwh1 primer sets to a highly degenerate primer set targeting a longer fragment (BF2+BR2) revealed that detection efficiency is slightly lower for the new primer set. Nevertheless, the shorter new primer pairs might be useful for studies that have to rely on degraded or poorly conserved DNA and thus be of importance for biomonitoring, conservation biological or molecular ecological studies. Furthermore, our study highlights the need for in silico evaluation of primer sets in order to detect design errors in primers (fwhR2) and find optimal universal primer sets for the target taxa of interest.

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            A new versatile primer set targeting a short fragment of the mitochondrial COI region for metabarcoding metazoan diversity: application for characterizing coral reef fish gut contents

            Introduction The PCR-based analysis of homologous genes has become one of the most powerful approaches for species detection and identification, particularly with the recent availability of Next Generation Sequencing platforms (NGS) making it possible to identify species composition from a broad range of environmental samples. Identifying species from these samples relies on the ability to match sequences with reference barcodes for taxonomic identification. Unfortunately, most studies of environmental samples have targeted ribosomal markers, despite the fact that the mitochondrial Cytochrome c Oxidase subunit I gene (COI) is by far the most widely available sequence region in public reference libraries. This is largely because the available versatile (“universal”) COI primers target the 658 barcoding region, whose size is considered too large for many NGS applications. Moreover, traditional barcoding primers are known to be poorly conserved across some taxonomic groups. Results We first design a new PCR primer within the highly variable mitochondrial COI region, the “mlCOIintF” primer. We then show that this newly designed forward primer combined with the “jgHCO2198” reverse primer to target a 313 bp fragment performs well across metazoan diversity, with higher success rates than versatile primer sets traditionally used for DNA barcoding (i.e. LCO1490/HCO2198). Finally, we demonstrate how the shorter COI fragment coupled with an efficient bioinformatics pipeline can be used to characterize species diversity from environmental samples by pyrosequencing. We examine the gut contents of three species of planktivorous and benthivorous coral reef fish (family: Apogonidae and Holocentridae). After the removal of dubious COI sequences, we obtained a total of 334 prey Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) belonging to 14 phyla from 16 fish guts. Of these, 52.5% matched a reference barcode (>98% sequence similarity) and an additional 32% could be assigned to a higher taxonomic level using Bayesian assignment. Conclusions The molecular analysis of gut contents targeting the 313 COI fragment using the newly designed mlCOIintF primer in combination with the jgHCO2198 primer offers enormous promise for metazoan metabarcoding studies. We believe that this primer set will be a valuable asset for a range of applications from large-scale biodiversity assessments to food web studies.
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              The ecology of environmental DNA and implications for conservation genetics

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                Author and article information

                Journal
                Metabarcoding and Metagenomics
                Metabarcoding and Metagenomics
                Pensoft Publishers
                2534-9708
                September 20 2017
                September 20 2017
                : 1
                : e14625
                Article
                10.3897/mbmg.1.14625
                163e9dc2-9969-483e-8e20-9ac863738cd4
                © 2017

                http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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