Metabarcoding tropical arthropods. invertebrate metagenome

Conserving biodiversity in the face of ever increasing human pressure is hampered by our basic lack of knowledge of what species exist?, where they are?, and what are their environmental requirements?On land, our grasp of vertebrate diversity is mostly complete, but our grasp of invertebrate diversity is way behind. This is because invertebrates are not big and cuddly and so don't attract much funding for research. They are hugely diverse and perhaps hundreds of thousands of species remain to be identified. Because they are so diverse, any field sampling effort to understand diversity is quickly hampered by the identification problem; months of time are required to identify all species in the sample, even incompletely to genus level. Thus, assessing invertebrate diversity and turnover across landscapes needs quick and efficient methods that allow us to assess diversity without wasting huge amounts of time and money on species identification. Next-generation sequencing and high-throughput technologies have revolutionized our ability to deal with large data problems. Among these, DNA metabarcoding is a promising method that can be applied to make rapid assessments of large diverse communities of meso- and micr-organisms. The ability of DNA metabarcoding analysis to identify and recover mock invertebrate communities has already been established. However, it has not often been applied to real world problems.