ArticleMolecular ecology2019
How much is enough? Effects of technical and biological replication on metabarcoding dietary analysis.
Article in Molecular ecology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 36 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
36 citing papers in PubMed, 115 citations in OpenAlex.
- Getting to the Core of the Matter-Assessing the Role of Replication in Metabarcoding-Based sedaDNA.Molecular ecology resources · 2026Article
- Using DNA Metabarcoding and Citizen Science to Assess the Diet of Owned Domestic Cats.Ecology and evolution · 2026Article
- Urbanization Shapes Dietary Composition and Snout Morphology of Salamanders.Molecular ecology · 2026Article
- Assessment of leaf-litter invertebrate biodiversity using high throughput sequencing.PloS one · 2026Article
- Dietary DNA Metabarcoding From Animal Fecal Samples.Current protocols · 2026Article
- Establishing DNA-Based Strategies for Soil Biodiversity Assessment: Insights From Carabid Beetles.Ecology and evolution · 2025Article
- Navigating Methodological Trade-Offs in eDNA Metabarcoding Biodiversity Monitoring: Insights From a Mediterranean Watershed.Molecular ecology resources · 2025Article
- The mitochondrial genomes of Iberian freshwater and diadromous fishes.Scientific data · 2025Article
- Wildlife fecal microbiota exhibit community stability across a longitudinal semi-controlled non-invasive sampling experiment.Frontiers in microbiomes · 2024Article
- Plants, pollinators and their interactions under global ecological change: The role of pollen DNA metabarcoding.Molecular ecology · 2023Article
- Using biological traits to assess diet selection: the case of the Pyrenean Desman.Journal of mammalogy · 2023Article
- Aerospace-foraging bats eat seasonably across varying habitats.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Exploring and validating observations of non-local species in eDNA samples.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Otterly delicious: Spatiotemporal variation in the diet of a recovering population of Eurasian otters (Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Laboratory protocol is important to improve the correlation between target copies and metabarcoding read numbers of seed DNA in ground beetle regurgitates.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- Signal and noise in metabarcoding data.PloS one · 2023Article
- Dietary preferences and feeding strategies of Colombian highland woolly monkeys.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- High-throughput sequencing reveals dietary segregation in Malaysian babblers.Current zoology · 2022Article
- Assessing Asiatic cheetah's individual diet using metabarcoding and its implication for conservation.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Multifaceted DNA metabarcoding of guano to uncover multiple classes of ecological data in two different bat communities.Evolutionary applications · 2022Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors at 4 institutions in 4 countries.
Funding
Abstract
DNA metabarcoding is increasingly used in dietary studies to estimate diversity, composition and frequency of occurrence of prey items. However, few studies have assessed how technical and biological replication affect the accuracy of diet estimates. This study addresses these issues using the European free-tailed bat Tadarida teniotis, involving high-throughput sequencing of a small fragment of the COI gene in 15 separate faecal pellets and a 15-pellet pool per each of 20 bats. We investigated how diet descriptors were affected by variability among (a) individuals, (b) pellets of each individual and (c) PCRs of each pellet. In addition, we investigated the impact of (d) analysing separate pellets vs. pellet pools. We found that diet diversity estimates increased steadily with the number of pellets analysed per individual, with seven pellets required to detect ~80% of prey species. Most variation in diet composition was associated with differences among individual bats, followed by pellets per individual and PCRs per pellet. The accuracy of frequency of occurrence estimates increased with the number of pellets analysed per bat, with the highest error rates recorded for prey consumed infrequently by many individuals. Pools provided poor estimates of diet diversity and frequency of occurrence, which were comparable to analysing a single pellet per individual, and consistently missed the less common prey items. Overall, our results stress that maximizing biological replication is critical in dietary metabarcoding studies and emphasize that analysing several samples per individual rather than pooled samples produce more accurate results.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.