Metabarcoding of eDNAbyss sediment samples Private
The abyssal sedimentary seafloor covers more than 50% of planet Earth and is a large reservoir of still mostly undescribed biodiversity, although being increasingly under target of resource-extraction industries. In such remote and vast ecosystems, the high detection power of environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding on samples easier to gather than specimen collections, offers new perspectives for the standardized investigation of large-scale biodiversity and biogeography patterns. This project relies on sediment samples collected at 13 deep-sea sites spanning the Atlantic-Mediterranean transition zone, during scientific expeditions from Ifremer and collaborators (2016-2020) that took place in the framework of the institutional project '??Pourquoi Pas les Abysses?'? (https://wwz.ifremer.fr/Recherche-Technologie/Projets-MERLIN-Pour-la-MER-Lancement-d-Initiatives-Nouvelles/Pourquoi-pas-les-abysses) and partner projects. During those expeditions, triplicate sediment cores were collected at each site between the Azores Islands and the Tyrrhenian Sea, and processed in a standardized way before being frozen and shipped to the laboratory. Using eDNA metabarcoding with both mitochondrial COI and the V1-V2 region of 18S ribosomal RNA (rRNA), this dataset investigates local, regional and global scale patterns of metazoan biodiversity. We evaluate the relationship between the patern of distribution of metazeoan biodiversity and a set of environmental (depth, depth in sediment, organic content, granulometry) as well as biotic parameters (i.e. the community structure for prokaryote and protists revealed through metabarcoding of 16S V4-V5 and 18S-V9, respectively) to better understand the contemporary and historical drivers influencing the distribution of metazoan biodiversity within and among oceanographic basins.