ArticleBiology letters2022
The bug in a teacup-monitoring arthropod-plant associations with environmental DNA from dried plant material.
Article in Biology letters, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 9 papers.
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Who cites it
9 citing papers in PubMed.
- Bug bites.Nature chemistry · 2026Article
- Testing newly developed PCR primers for high-specificity enrichment of bees from terrestrial eDNA.BMC research notes · 2026Article
- Dietary niche partitioning and convergent gut microbiota in sympatricFrontiers in microbiology · 2026Article
- Assessment of leaf-litter invertebrate biodiversity using high throughput sequencing.PloS one · 2026Article
- Archived natural DNA samplers reveal four decades of biodiversity change across the tree of life.Nature ecology & evolution · 2025Article
- Arthropods are kin: Operationalizing Indigenous data sovereignty to respectfully utilize genomic data from Indigenous lands.Molecular ecology resources · 2025Article
- Three steps towards comparability and standardization among molecular methods for characterizing insect communities.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2024Article
- Article
- The bug in a teacup-monitoring arthropod-plant associations with environmental DNA from dried plant material.Biology letters · 2022Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
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Abstract
Environmental DNA analysis (eDNA) has revolutionized the field of biomonitoring in the past years. Various sources have been shown to contain eDNA of diverse organisms, for example, water, soil, gut content and plant surfaces. Here we show that dried plant material is a highly promising source for arthropod community eDNA. We designed a metabarcoding assay to enrich diverse arthropod communities while preventing amplification of plant DNA. Using this assay, we analysed various commercially produced teas and herbs. These samples recovered ecologically and taxonomically diverse arthropod communities, a total of over a thousand species in more than 20 orders, many of them specific to their host plant and its geographical origin. Atypically for eDNA, arthropod DNA in dried plants shows very high temporal stability, opening up plant archives as a source for historical arthropod eDNA. Considering these results, dried plant material appears excellently suited as a novel tool to monitor arthropods and arthropod-plant interactions, detect agricultural pests and identify the geographical origin of imported plant material. The simplicity of our approach and the ability to detect highly diverse arthropod communities from all over the world in tea bags also highlights its utility for outreach purposes and to raise awareness about biodiversity.
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Registered trials
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