PRJNA505454
Environmental DNA: a new low-cost monitoring tool for pathogens in salmonid aquaculture
Environmental DNA (eDNA-seq) metabarcoding is a relatively new monitoring tool featuring in an increasing number of applications such as the facilitation of the accurate and cost effective detection of species in environmental samples. eDNA monitoring is likely to have a major impact on the ability of salmonid aquaculture industry producers and their regulators to detect the presence and abundance of pathogens and other biological threats in the surrounding environment. However, for eDNA metabarcoding to develop into a useful bio-monitoring tool it is necessary to validate that sequence datasets derived from amplification of meta-barcoding markers reflect the true species' identity across a range of abundances in biological samples and under environmental noise, and establish a low-cost sequencing method to enable the bulk processing of environmental samples. In this project, we employed an elaborate experimental design whereby different combinations of five biological agents were crossed at three abundance levels and exposed to sterile pre-filtered and unfiltered seawater, prior to coarse filtering and then eDNA ultrafiltration of the resultant material. We then benchmarked the low-cost, scalable, Ion Torrent sequencing method against the current gold-standard Illumina platform for eDNAseq detection in aquaculture.