Transport Distance of Invertebrate Environmental DNA in a Natural River

By K. Deiner, F. Altermatt. PLoS ONE, 2014

650 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Environmental DNA (eDNA) monitoring is a novel molecular technique to detect species in natural habitats. Many eDNA studies in aquatic systems have focused on lake or ponds, and/or on large vertebrate species, but applications to invertebrates in river systems are emerging. A challenge in applying eDNA monitoring in flowing waters is that a species' DNA can be transported downstream. Whether and how far eDNA can be detected due to downstream transport remains largely unknown. In this study we tested for downstream detection of eDNA for two invertebrate species, Daphnia longispina and Unio tumidus, which are lake dwelling species in our study area. The goal was to determine how far away from the source population in a lake their eDNA could be detected in an outflowing river. We sampled water from eleven river sites in regular intervals up to 12.3 km downstream of the lake, developed new eDNA probes for both species, and used a standard PCR and Sanger sequencing detection method to confirm presence of each species' eDNA in the river. We detected D. longispina at all locations and across two time points (July and October); whereas with U. tumidus, we observed a decreased detection rate and did not detect its eDNA after 9.1 km. We also observed a difference in detection for this species at different times of year. The observed movement of eDNA from the source amounting to nearly 10 km for these species indicates that the resolution of an eDNA sample can be large in river systems. Our results indicate that there may be species' specific transport distances for eDNA and demonstrate for the first time that invertebrate eDNA can persist over relatively large distances in a natural river system.

Subfields: Ecology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b48a9db9fe4f4a7daeb5d8cfaaacffa16ce1ac04

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Citations in the corpus

Environmental DNA metabarcoding: Transforming how we survey animal and plant communities (2017, background): “…individual species were found in that time and place, but for eDNA, the organism that produced the DNA may be upstream from the sampled location (Deiner & Altermatt, 2014), or the DNA may have been transported in the faeces of a more mobile predatory species (e.g., birds depositing fish eDNA,…”
Towards the Optimization of eDNA/eRNA Sampling Technologies for Marine Biosecurity Surveillance (2021, background): “…least expensive, and have been successfully applied for monitoring aquatic biodiversity from both pelagic and benthic aquatic environments [94,138,144–146], they are time-consuming and include the use of toxic chemicals that restrict their application to specialized personnel and labs only [36].”
How will the ‘molecular revolution’ contribute to biological recording? (2015, background): “This indicates that eDNA can persist over relatively large distances in river systems, and that there may be species-specific transport distances for eDNA (Deiner & Altermatt, 2014).”
Uncovering the complete biodiversity structure in spatial networks: the example of riverine systems (2020, background): “Several studies have estimated the transport distance in rivers for eDNA of single species and results vary from 0.25 to 12 km (Deiner and Altermatt 2014, Jane et al.”
Fish community assessment with eDNA metabarcoding: effects of sampling design and bioinformatic filtering (2017, background): “Previous studies have illustrated that eDNA can be transported relatively long distances downstream (Deiner and Altermatt 2014; Jane et al. 2015).”
Assessing different components of diversity across a river network using eDNA (2019, background): “Those results were likely due to eDNA at one loca‐ tion integrating taxon information from upstream reaches via downstream transportation of eDNA (Deiner & Altermatt, 2014; Deiner, Fronhofer, Mächler, Walser, & Altermatt, 2016; Pont et al., 2018).”
The ecologist's field guide to sequence‐based identification of biodiversity (2016, background): “In rivers, eDNA can even represent information that is integrated over large spatial areas due to the transport of DNA downstream (Deiner & Altermatt 2014).”