ArticlePLoS biology2019
Boosting natural history research via metagenomic clean-up of crowdsourced feces.
Article in PLoS biology, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
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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.
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Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Towards holistic insect monitoring: species discovery, description, identification and traits for all insects.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Review
- Combining methods for non-invasive fecal DNA enables whole genome and metagenomic analyses in wildlife biology.Frontiers in genetics · 2022Article
- Metagenomics: A viable tool for reconstructing herbivore diet.Molecular ecology resources · 2021Article
- ONTbarcoder and MinION barcodes aid biodiversity discovery and identification by everyone, for everyone.BMC biology · 2021Article
- Faecal proteomics as a novel method to study mammalian behaviour and physiology.Molecular ecology resources · 2021Article
- Faecal DNA to the rescue: Shotgun sequencing of non-invasive samples reveals two subspecies of Southeast Asian primates to be Critically Endangered species.Scientific reports · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Biodiversity is in crisis due to habitat destruction and climate change. The conservation of many noncharismatic species is hampered by the lack of data. Yet, natural history research-a major source of information on noncharismatic species-is in decline. We here suggest a remedy for many mammal species, i.e., metagenomic clean-up of fecal samples that are "crowdsourced" during routine field surveys. Based on literature data, we estimate that this approach could yield natural history information for circa 1,000 species within a decade. Metagenomic analysis would simultaneously yield natural history data on diet and gut parasites while enhancing our understanding of host genetics, gut microbiome, and the functional interactions between traditional and new natural history data. We document the power of this approach by carrying out a "metagenomic clean-up" on fecal samples collected during a single night of small mammal trapping in one of Alfred Wallace's favorite collecting sites.
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Registered trials
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