Environmental metabarcoding of marine sediments with and without, PCR and eDNA removal;

We applied experimental procedures to process mock marine sediment samples, aiming to simplify the metabarcoding workflow and arrive at a best possible representation of the known organismal content of the samples in terms of species and biomass. Firstly, we explored whether extracting genomic DNA directly from bulk sediment samples upon removal of extracellular DNA (exDNA), thereby circumventing the sieving and sorting steps, would be a viable procedure. Secondly, we examined how shotgun sequencing of taxonomically diverse organisms compares to a PCR based approach, seeking to avoid the biases associated with primer selection and PCR amplification.