Environmental
            DNA
            Sampling of Small‐Bodied Minnows: Performance Relative to Location, Species, and Traditional Sampling

The unintentional transport of invasive species through the global shipping network causes substantial losses to social and economic welfare. Addressing this global challenge requires identification of potentially harmful species, and confirmation of their movement along highly frequented shipping routes. As we have previously shown, properly calibrated network models are able to describe passive movement of invasive species around the world. These models can be substantially improved when suitable in-situ biological data is becoming available, now possible by sequencing of environmental DNA (eDNA) from port waters. Here we report a simple and scalable approach to generate metabarcoding data of 18S ribosomal and other eDNA collected in four major US ports. Between Long Beach, Houston, Miami, Baltimore and a multitude of Chinese ports, ships travel both frequently or infrequently while linking to different ecosystems of East Asia. By controlling for ecoregions and ship traffic, we will shortly be able to estimate ship-borne invasive species spread between the two largest global economies, USA and China. With further port DNA sampling and network model refinements, we will also soon be able to provide global assessments of ship-borne invasive species spread to inform management and policy decision makers.

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Collaborative environmental DNA sampling from petal surfaces of flowering cherry Cerasus × yedoensis ‘Somei-yoshino’ across the Japanese archipelago

Journal of Plant Research ◽

10.1007/s10265-018-1017-x ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 131 (4) ◽

pp. 709-717

Author(s):

Tazro Ohta ◽

Takeshi Kawashima ◽

Natsuko O. Shinozaki ◽

Akito Dobashi ◽

Satoshi Hiraoka ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Environmental Dna ◽

Japanese Archipelago ◽

Dna Sampling ◽

Flowering Cherry ◽

The Japanese Archipelago

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Plastic-degrading potential across the global microbiome correlates with recent pollution trends

10.1101/2020.12.13.422558 ◽

2020 ◽

Author(s):

Jan Zrimec ◽

Mariia Kokina ◽

Sara Jonasson ◽

Francisco Zorrilla ◽

Aleksej Zelezniak

Keyword(s):

Sustainable Management ◽

Environmental Dna ◽

Taxonomic Composition ◽

Plastic Waste ◽

Plastic Pollution ◽

The Earth ◽

Global Environmental ◽

Dna Sampling ◽

Microbiome Data ◽

Country Specific

Poor recycling has accumulated millions of tons of plastic waste in terrestrial and marine environments. While biodegradation is a plausible route towards sustainable management of plastic waste, the global diversity of plastic-degrading enzymes remains poorly understood. Taking advantage of global environmental DNA sampling projects, here we construct HMM models from experimentally-verified enzyme sequences and mine ocean and soil metagenomes to assess the global potential of microorganisms to degrade plastics. By controlling for false-positives using gut microbiome data, we compile a catalogue of over 30,000 non-redundant enzyme homologues with the potential to degrade 10 different plastic types. While differences between the ocean and soil microbiomes likely reflect the base compositions of these environments, we find that ocean enzyme abundance might increase with depth as a response to plastic pollution and not merely taxonomic composition. By obtaining further pollution measurements, we reveal that the abundance of the uncovered enzymes in both ocean and soil habitats significantly correlates with marine and country-specific plastic pollution trends. Our study thus uncovers the Earth microbiome's potential to degrade plastics, providing evidence of a measurable effect of plastic pollution on the global microbial ecology as well as a useful resource for further applied research.

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