The rapidity, repeatability, cost-effectiveness, and comprehensiveness of metabarcoding will transform the environmental sciences and make it possible to use measures of biodiversity to address many of China’s needs.

Managing the forces that affect both the levels and distribution of biodiversity requires the ability to measure biodiversity comprehensively, reliably, repeatedly, and over large scales. Unfortunately, traditional biodiversity assessments are costly in time, money, and taxonomic expertise, and the data are frequently collected in ways making auditing by neutral parties—a necessity for resolving disputes—almost impossible.

Dr. Douglas Yu and his team at the Ecology, Conservation, and Environment Center (ECEC) of the Kunming Institute of Zoology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, recently developed a method for extracting ecological, taxonomic, and phylogenetic information from bulk samples of arthropods, in a kind of “biodiversity soup.” The protocols combine mass-trapping of arthropods, mass-PCR amplification of the COI barcoding gene, pyrosequencing, and bioinformatic analysis, which together the team calls “metabarcoding.”

Assembling seven communities of arthropods, Dr. Yu’s team showed that it is possible to recover a substantial proportion of the original taxonomic information. Likewise, for the first time they showed that metabarcoding allows for the precise estimation of pairwise community dissimilarity (beta diversity) and within-community phylogenetic diversity (alpha diversity), despite the inevitable loss of taxonomic information and resolution inherent to metabarcoding.Alpha and beta diversity metrics are the raw materials of ecology and the environmental sciences, facilitating assessment of the state of the environment with a broad and efficient measure of biodiversity.  

The rapidity, repeatability, cost-effectiveness, and comprehensiveness of metagenetics has the potential to transform environmental sciences by making it possible to use measures of biodiversity to address many of China’s pressing environmental needs: (1) the discovery and monitoring of areas of high and unique biodiversity; (2) the detection and monitoring of pests, disease vectors, and pollution; and (3) the management and monitoring of ecological restoration projects, such as in rubber tree plantations.

This research was supported by National Science Foundation of China, Yunnan Province, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

Reference link: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.2041-210X.2012.00198.x/abstract