ArticlePloS one2019
Watered-down biodiversity? A comparison of metabarcoding results from DNA extracted from matched water and bulk tissue biomonitoring samples.
Article in PloS one, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 21 papers.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed.
- Simplifying Macroinvertebrate Biodiversity Assessment: A Standardised Metabarcoding Method for Invertebrate Samples With High Volumes of Debris.Molecular ecology resources · 2026Article
- Comparison of Environmental DNA and Bulk DNA Metabarcoding for Assessing Terrestrial Arthropod Diversity Across Three Habitat Types on Guam.Molecular ecology resources · 2026Article
- Comparative Multi-Marker Environmental DNA Metabarcoding of Marine Metazoan Communities: Water vs. Sediment.Molecular ecology resources · 2026Article
- Multi-Tool Marine Metabarcoding Bioassessment for Baselining and Monitoring Species and Communities in Kelp Habitats.Molecular ecology resources · 2025Article
- EntoSieve: Automated Size-Sorting of Insect Bulk Samples to Aid Accurate Megabarcoding and Metabarcoding.Molecular ecology resources · 2025Article
- Temporal and Depth-Driven Variability of Pelagic Bacterial Communities in Lake Erie: Biofilm and Plankton Dynamics.Environmental microbiology reports · 2025Article
- North Atlantic deep-sea benthic biodiversity unveiled through sponge natural sampler DNA.Communications biology · 2024Article
- A new sampling device for metabarcoding surveillance of port communities and detection of non-indigenous species.iScience · 2024Article
- Article
- Comparative environmental RNA and DNA metabarcoding analysis of river algae and arthropods for ecological surveys and water quality assessment.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- Multi-marker DNA metabarcoding detects suites of environmental gradients from an urban harbour.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- LANDMark: an ensemble approach to the supervised selection of biomarkers in high-throughput sequencing data.BMC bioinformatics · 2022Article
- Comparing eDNA metabarcoding primers for assessing fish communities in a biodiverse estuary.PloS one · 2022Article
- Modelling technical and biological biases in macroinvertebrate community assessment from bulk preservative using multiple metabarcoding markers.Molecular ecology · 2021Article
- Environmental DNA gives comparable results to morphology-based indices of macroinvertebrates in a large-scale ecological assessment.PloS one · 2021Article
- Article
- Method for the Identification of Plant DNA in Food Using Alignment-Free Analysis of Sequencing Reads: A Case Study on Lupin.Frontiers in plant science · 2020Article
- Article
- Article
- Variations in terrestrial arthropod DNA metabarcoding methods recovers robust beta diversity but variable richness and site indicators.Scientific reports · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Biomonitoring programs have evolved beyond the sole use of morphological identification to determine the composition of invertebrate species assemblages in an array of ecosystems. The application of DNA metabarcoding in freshwater systems for assessing benthic invertebrate communities is now being employed to generate biological information for environmental monitoring and assessment. A possible shift from the extraction of DNA from net-collected bulk benthic samples to its extraction directly from water samples for metabarcoding has generated considerable interest based on the assumption that taxon detectability is comparable when using either method. To test this, we studied paired water and benthos samples from a taxon-rich wetland complex, to investigate differences in the detection of arthropod taxa from each sample type. We demonstrate that metabarcoding of DNA extracted directly from water samples is a poor surrogate for DNA extracted from bulk benthic samples, focusing on key bioindicator groups. Our results continue to support the use of bulk benthic samples as a basis for metabarcoding-based biomonitoring, with nearly three times greater total richness in benthic samples compared to water samples. We also demonstrated that few arthropod taxa are shared between collection methods, with a notable lack of key bioindicator EPTO taxa in the water samples. Although species coverage in water could likely be improved through increased sample replication and/or increased sequencing depth, benthic samples remain the most representative, cost-effective method of generating aquatic compositional information via metabarcoding.
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