Environmental health monitoring would benefit from eDNA biobanking

Simon Jarman, Oliver Berry (Environomics FSP Leader) and Michael Bunce recently penned an article about the need for an environmental DNA (eDNA) biobank.

With the advancement of DNA sequencing technology, biomonitoring with environmental DNA (“eDNA”) is revolutionizing biodiversity assessments. Conventionally, characterizing biodiversity requires time-consuming surveys and expert knowledge. However, researchers can now identify organisms without capturing or seeing them from DNA fragments they leave behind in substrates such as soil, water and even air. However, the rapid growth of DNA sequencing technology has brought with it some problems. At this stage, there are no standards that allow eDNA datasets generated by different technologies to be compared. This means detecting environmental change through time is difficult.

The authors propose that eDNA biobanking – centralized, databased and carefully archived environmental DNA samples – is a solution to the problem. Read their original article in Nature, Ecology and Evolution or their follow-up piece published in The Conversation.