Diet Composition of Green Sea Turtles (Chelonia mydas)

The purpose of this study was to test six different DNA metabarcoding primer pairs for their efficacy in reconstructing diet of omnivorous green sea turtles. Primer pairs were all tested on DNA extracts from gut content samples collected from 39 individual green turtles that stranded off the coast of Florida between 2009 and 2015 (Florida Marine Turtle Permits 081 and 256). The primer pairs tested targeted the following genomic regions: CO1, 18S (V1-V3 and V4), rbcL, UPA, and ITS. Results from this study were presented at the 2022 meeting of the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology as part of the symposium: DNA metabarcoding across disciplines: sequencing our way to greater understanding across scales of biological organization. The associated manuscript will be published in the the journal Integrative and Comparative Biology (2022).