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The value of environmental DNA biobanking for long-term biomonitoring

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 2, pages 1192–1193 (2018)Cite this article

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The downside of technological improvements in eDNA metabarcoding is that past research methods become redundant. Reagents and equipment become unavailable when DNA sequencing systems advance2. Furthermore, eDNA metabarcoding studies do not have standards that would allow datasets generated by different technologies to be compared. This lack of comparability limits studies in this area to end-point analysis using one specific methodology. This is particularly problematic for the use of eDNA as a multi-year environmental surveying tool by government and industry regulators.

‘eDNA biobanking’ is a solution to the problem. ‘Biobanking’ in medicine is the standardized sampling, curation and long-term storage of healthy and diseased human tissues3. Biobanking has a significant role in many areas of contemporary medical research and especially in oncology. Sample storage centralization, scaling and systematized metadata collection allows comparisons that are impossible with single studies. A similar example of the value of centralized storage is the international DNA sequence data repositories (http://www.insdc.org/). Sequence data from these repositories are necessary for almost all molecular biological research projects today4. eDNA biobanking could have similar enabling effects for future environmental research and management.

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Fig. 1: Increase in number and diversity of eDNA metabarcoding studies.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Environomics Future Science Platform, CSIRO National Collections and Marine Infrastructure, Crawley, Western Australia, Australia

    Simon N. Jarman & Oliver Berry

  2. Trace and Environmental DNA laboratory, Molecular and Life Sciences, Curtin University, Bentley, Western Australia, Australia

    Simon N. Jarman & Michael Bunce

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  1. Simon N. Jarman
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  2. Oliver Berry
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  3. Michael Bunce
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Correspondence to Simon N. Jarman.

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Jarman, S.N., Berry, O. & Bunce, M. The value of environmental DNA biobanking for long-term biomonitoring. Nat Ecol Evol 2, 1192–1193 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-018-0614-3

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