Advances in metabarcoding techniques bring us closer to reliable monitoring of the marine benthos

1. Reliable and accurate biodiversity census methods are essential for monitoring ecosystem health and assessing potential ecological impacts of future development projects. Although metabarcoding is increasingly used to study biodiversity across ecological research, morphology-based identification remains the preferred approach for marine ecological impact assessments. Comparing metabarcoding to morphology-based protocols currently used by ecological surveyors is essential to determine whether this DNA-based approach is suitable for the long-term monitoring of marine ecosystems. 2. We compared metabarcoding and morphology-based approaches for the analysis of invertebrates in low diversity intertidal marine sediment samples. We used a recently developed bioinformatics pipeline and two taxonomic assignment methods to resolve and assign amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) from Illumina amplicon data. We analysed the community composition recovered by both methods and tested the effects, on ...

1. 可靠且精准的生物多样性普查方法，是监测生态系统健康状况、评估未来开发项目潜在生态影响的核心支撑手段。尽管元条形码（metabarcoding）在各类生态研究中愈发广泛地用于生物多样性探究，但基于形态学的物种鉴定仍是海洋生态影响评估领域的首选方法。将元条形码技术与当前生态调查人员所采用的基于形态学的实验方案进行对比，是明确该DNA检测方法是否适用于海洋生态系统长期监测的必要前提。2. 本研究针对低多样性潮间带海洋沉积物样本中的无脊椎动物，对比了元条形码与基于形态学的两种分析方法。本研究采用新近开发的生物信息学流程与两种分类学赋值方法，对Illumina扩增子测序数据中的扩增子序列变异体（ASVs）进行解析与分类赋值。本研究对两种方法所获取的群落组成进行了分析，并探究了其对……的影响。