Amazing stuff!
"... We deployed three samplers at the zoo: one in a stable with two okapi (Okapia johnstoni) and two duikers, one in a rainforest house and one outside, near an exhibit of animals that live in the African savannah. ...
They picked up identifiable DNA from 49 vertebrates, including guppies in the rainforest pool, ostriches and giraffes in the savannah area, and even cats and dogs in the park next door. Interestingly, we didn’t get any signal from turtles in the rainforest house. ...
They picked up identifiable DNA from 49 vertebrates, including guppies in the rainforest pool, ostriches and giraffes in the savannah area, and even cats and dogs in the park next door. Interestingly, we didn’t get any signal from turtles in the rainforest house. ...
Our analysis ultimately found that the sampler could detect animals from nearly 200 metres away. ... Airborne DNA is all around us. ..."
From the abstract:
"Biodiversity monitoring at the community scale is a critical element of assessing and studying species distributions, ecology, diversity, and movements, and it is key to understanding and tracking environmental and anthropogenic effects on natural ecosystems. ... Terrestrial vertebrate monitoring using existing methods is generally costly and laborious, and although environmental DNA (eDNA) is becoming the tool of choice to assess biodiversity, few sample types effectively capture terrestrial vertebrate diversity. ... We filtered air at three localities in the Copenhagen Zoo: a stable, outside between the outdoor enclosures, and in the Rainforest House. Through metabarcoding of airborne eDNA, we detected 49 vertebrate species ... These spanned animals kept at the zoo, species occurring in the zoo surroundings, and species used as feed in the zoo. ... We hereby show that airborne eDNA can offer a fundamentally new way of studying and monitoring terrestrial communities."
No comments:
Post a Comment