DNA metabarcoding of Amazonian ichthyoplankton swarms

Tropical rainforests harbor extraordinary biodiversity. The Amazon basin is thought to hold 30% of all river fish species in the world. Information about the ecology, reproduction, and recruitment of most species is still lacking, thus hampering fisheries management and successful conservation strategies. One of the key understudied issues in the study of population dynamics is recruitment. Fish larval ecology in tropical biomes is still in its infancy owing to identification difficulties. Molecular techniques are very promising tools for the identification of larvae at the species level. However, one of their limits is obtaining individual sequences with large samples of larvae. To facilitate this task, we developed a new method based on the massive parallel sequencing capability of next generation sequencing (NGS) coupled with hybridization capture. We focused on the mitochondrial marker cytochrome oxidase I (COI). The results obtained using the new method were compared with individua...热带雨林蕴藏着极为丰富的生物多样性。据估算，亚马孙流域拥有全球30%的淡水鱼类物种。目前学界对多数鱼类物种的生态、繁殖及种群补充情况仍知之甚少，这阻碍了渔业管理与有效保护策略的落地实施。种群动态研究中尚未得到充分探索的核心议题之一，便是种群补充。受物种鉴定难度限制，热带生物群落中的鱼类仔鱼生态学研究仍处于起步阶段。分子技术是实现仔鱼物种级鉴定的极具潜力的工具，但这类技术的局限之一在于，难以从大量仔鱼样本中获取单一个体的序列信息。为解决这一难题，我们基于下一代测序（next generation sequencing, NGS）的大规模并行测序能力，并结合杂交捕获技术，开发了一种全新研究方法。我们选取了线粒体标记基因细胞色素氧化酶I（cytochrome oxidase I, COI）作为研究靶点。采用该新方法获得的实验结果，将与单个体[...]进行比对。