New England Cottontail RadSeq FecalSeq holds promise

This project sought to test if were able to obtain genomic information from New England Cottontail fecal pellets. Pellets were collected off of snow, 2-5 days after deposition, from animals who were never observed. After extraction, we used the FecalSeq enrichment to remove exogenous DNA and retain endogenous DNA. 3Rad libraries were then prepared from the enriched samples. We tested how this protocol performed with fecal samples of various quality--poor and deal sampling conditions, known microsatellite failures, low and high starting DNA content. We used both population structure and matched genotypes to test the success of the method.