Trace and Environmental DNA (TrEnD) Laboratory, School of Molecular and Life Sciences, Curtin University, Bentley, Western Australia.
Fish Ecology Laboratory, School Molecular and Life Sciences, Curtin University, Bentley, Western Australia.
PLoS Genet. 2019 Feb 8;15(2):e1007943. doi: 10.1371/journal.pgen.1007943. eCollection 2019 Feb.
Marine ecosystems are changing rapidly as the oceans warm and become more acidic. The physical factors and the changes to ocean chemistry that they drive can all be measured with great precision. Changes in the biological composition of communities in different ocean regions are far more challenging to measure because most biological monitoring methods focus on a limited taxonomic or size range. Environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis has the potential to solve this problem in biological oceanography, as it is capable of identifying a huge phylogenetic range of organisms to species level. Here we develop and apply a novel multi-gene molecular toolkit to eDNA isolated from bulk plankton samples collected over a five-year period from a single site. This temporal scale and level of detail is unprecedented in eDNA studies. We identified consistent seasonal assemblages of zooplankton species, which demonstrates the ability of our toolkit to audit community composition. We were also able to detect clear departures from the regular seasonal patterns that occurred during an extreme marine heatwave. The integration of eDNA analyses with existing biotic and abiotic surveys delivers a powerful new long-term approach to monitoring the health of our world's oceans in the context of a rapidly changing climate.
海洋生态系统正随着海洋变暖及酸化而迅速发生变化。可以非常精确地测量它们驱动的物理因素和海洋化学变化。不同海洋区域群落的生物组成变化更难以测量，因为大多数生物监测方法仅关注有限的分类或大小范围。环境 DNA (eDNA) 分析在生物海洋学中具有解决这一问题的潜力，因为它能够鉴定出大量的生物，从进化枝到物种水平。在这里，我们开发并应用了一种新的多基因分子工具包，用于从单个地点采集的为期五年的浮游生物样本的总 eDNA 中进行分析。在 eDNA 研究中，这种时间尺度和详细程度是前所未有的。我们确定了浮游动物物种的一致季节性组合，这证明了我们的工具包能够对群落组成进行审计。我们还能够检测到在海洋热浪期间发生的明显偏离正常季节性模式的情况。eDNA 分析与现有的生物和非生物调查相结合，为监测快速变化的气候背景下我们世界海洋的健康状况提供了一种强大的新的长期方法。
