Imperial College London
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ProfessorVincentSavolainen

Faculty of Natural Sciences, Department of Life Sciences (Silwood Park)

Professor of Organismic Biology
 
 
 
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Contact

 

v.savolainen CV

 
 
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Assistant

 

Ms Elisabeth Ahlstrom +44 (0)20 7594 2207

 
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Location

 

N.1-17MunroSilwood Park

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@article{Steyaert:2020:10.1111/1365-2664.13729,
author = {Steyaert, M and Priestley, V and Osborne, O and herraiz, A and Arnold, R and Savolainen, V},
doi = {10.1111/1365-2664.13729},
journal = {Journal of Applied Ecology},
pages = {2234--2245},
title = {Advances in metabarcoding techniques bring us closer to reliable monitoring of the marine benthos},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.13729},
volume = {57},
year = {2020}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - JOUR
AB  - Reliable and accurate biodiversity census methods are essential for monitoring ecosystem health and assessing potential ecological impacts of future development projects. Although metabarcoding is increasingly used to study biodiversity across ecological research, morphologybased identification remains the preferred approach for marine ecological impact assessments. Comparing metabarcoding to morphologybased protocols currently used by ecological surveyors is essential to determine whether this DNAbased approach is suitable for the longterm monitoring of marine ecosystems.We compared metabarcoding and morphologybased approaches for the analysis of invertebrates in low diversity intertidal marine sediment samples. We used a recently developed bioinformatics pipeline and two taxonomic assignment methods to resolve and assign amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) from Illumina amplicon data. We analysed the community composition recovered by both methods and tested the effects, on the levels of diversity detected by the metabarcoding method, of sieving samples prior to DNA extraction.Metabarcoding of the mitochondrial marker cytochrome c oxidase I (COI) gene recovers the presence of more taxonomic groups than the morphological approach. We found that sieving samples results in lower alpha diversity detected and suggests a community composition that differs significantly from that suggested by unsieved samples in our metabarcoding analysis. We found that whilst metabarcoding and morphological approaches detected similar numbers of species, they are unable to identify the same set of species across samples.Synthesis and Applications We show that metabarcoding using the cytochrome c oxidase I (COI) marker provides a more holistic, communitybased, analysis of benthic invertebrate diversity than a traditional morphological approach. We also highlight current gaps in reference databases and bioinformatic pipelines for the identification of intertidal benthic invertebrates
AU  - Steyaert,M
AU  - Priestley,V
AU  - Osborne,O
AU  - herraiz,A
AU  - Arnold,R
AU  - Savolainen,V
DO  - 10.1111/1365-2664.13729
EP  - 2245
PY  - 2020///
SN  - 0021-8901
SP  - 2234
TI  - Advances in metabarcoding techniques bring us closer to reliable monitoring of the marine benthos
T2  - Journal of Applied Ecology
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1365-2664.13729
UR  - https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2664.13729
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/81343
VL  - 57
ER  -
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