ArticleEcology and evolution2020
Keeping it cool: Soil sample cold pack storage and DNA shipment up to 1 month does not impact metabarcoding results.
Article in Ecology and evolution, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 14 papers.
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Who cites it
14 citing papers in PubMed.
- Assessment of Stability of Preservation Techniques for Strawberry Soil Microbiomes: Exploring the Biotechnological Relevance for Sustainable Agriculture.Microorganisms · 2026Article
- Phosphorus availability mediates pathway-specific nitrogen cycling in stratified peatland microbiomes.ISME communications · 2026Article
- Soil microbiome composition is highly responsive to precipitation and plant composition manipulations in a field biodiversity experiment.Frontiers in microbiomes · 2025Article
- Soil storage temperature and air-drying did not significantly change bacterial taxa in the short-term.PeerJ · 2025Article
- Drying as an effective method to store soil samples for DNA-based microbial community analyses: a comparative study.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Culturomics- and metagenomics-based insights into the soil microbiome preservation and application for sustainable agriculture.Frontiers in microbiology · 2024Review
- Does soil history decline in influencing the structure of bacterial communities ofISME communications · 2024Article
- Rapid differentiation of soil and root microbiomes in response to plant composition and biodiversity in the field.ISME communications · 2023Article
- Soil Chemistry and Soil History Significantly Structure Oomycete Communities inApplied and environmental microbiology · 2023Article
- Article
- Storage of soil microbiome for application in sustainable agriculture: prospects and challenges.Environmental science and pollution research international · 2022Review
- Preservation methods of honey bee-collected pollen are not a source of bias in ITS2 metabarcoding.Environmental monitoring and assessment · 2021Article
- Pulse Frequency in Crop Rotations Alters Soil Microbial Community Networks and the Relative Abundance of Fungal Plant Pathogens.Frontiers in microbiology · 2021Article
- Keeping it cool: Soil sample cold pack storage and DNA shipment up to 1 month does not impact metabarcoding results.Ecology and evolution · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
With the advances of sequencing tools, the fields of environmental microbiology and soil ecology have been transformed. Today, the unculturable majority of soil microbes can be sequenced. Although these tools give us tremendous power and open many doors to answer important questions, we must understand how sample processing may impact our results and interpretations. Here, we test the impacts of four soil storage methods on downstream amplicon metabarcoding and qPCR analyses for fungi and bacteria. We further investigate the impact of thaw time on extracted DNA to determine a safe length of time during which this can occur with minimal impact on study results. Overall, we find that storage using standard cold packs with subsequent storage at -20°C is little different than immediate storage in liquid nitrogen, suggesting that the historical and current method is adequate. We further find evidence that storage at room temperature or with aid of RNAlater can lead to changes in community composition and in the case of RNAlater, lower gene copies. We therefore advise against these storage methods for metabarcoding analyses. Finally, we show that over 1 month, DNA extract thaw time does not impact diversity or qPCR metrics. We hope that this work will help researchers working with soil bacteria and fungi make informed decisions about soil storage and transport to ensure repeatability and accuracy of results and interpretations.
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