Roslin Tomas, Majaneva Sanna
a Department of Ecology, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Box 7044, 750 07 Uppsala, Sweden.
b Spatial Foodweb Ecology Group, Department of Agricultural Sciences, PO Box 27, (Latokartanonkaari 5), FI-00014 University of Helsinki, Finland.
Genome. 2016 Sep;59(9):603-28. doi: 10.1139/gen-2015-0229. Epub 2016 Apr 20.
By depicting who eats whom, food webs offer descriptions of how groupings in nature (typically species or populations) are linked to each other. For asking questions on how food webs are built and work, we need descriptions of food webs at different levels of resolution. DNA techniques provide opportunities for highly resolved webs. In this paper, we offer an exposé of how DNA-based techniques, and DNA barcodes in particular, have recently been used to construct food web structure in both terrestrial and aquatic systems. We highlight how such techniques can be applied to simultaneously improve the taxonomic resolution of the nodes of the web (i.e., the species), and the links between them (i.e., who eats whom). We end by proposing how DNA barcodes and DNA information may allow new approaches to the construction of larger interaction webs, and overcome some hurdles to achieving adequate sample size. Most importantly, we propose that the joint adoption and development of these techniques may serve to unite approaches to food web studies in aquatic and terrestrial systems-revealing the extent to which food webs in these environments are structured similarly to or differently from each other, and how they are linked by dispersal.
通过描绘谁吃谁，食物网描述了自然界中的群体（通常是物种或种群）是如何相互联系的。为了探讨食物网是如何构建和运作的问题，我们需要不同分辨率水平的食物网描述。DNA技术为构建高分辨率的食物网提供了机会。在本文中，我们阐述了基于DNA的技术，特别是DNA条形码，最近是如何被用于构建陆地和水生系统中的食物网结构的。我们强调了这些技术如何能够同时提高食物网节点（即物种）的分类分辨率以及它们之间的联系（即谁吃谁）。最后，我们提出DNA条形码和DNA信息如何能够为构建更大的相互作用网络提供新方法，并克服实现足够样本量的一些障碍。最重要的是，我们提出联合采用和开发这些技术可能有助于统一水生和陆地系统中食物网研究的方法——揭示这些环境中的食物网在结构上彼此相似或不同的程度，以及它们是如何通过扩散相互联系的。
