Anna MacDonaldI'm a biologist with interests in genetics, conservation, ecology, invasive species, and wildlife management. Archives
May 2019
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Click here to read the full post at WildlifeSNPits:
I know a lot of biologists who have lists related to their work: lists of birds they have seen, lists of journals they want to publish in, lists of top wildlife spectacles they want to see, lists of species they have studied, lists of their favourite fieldwork sites. I too have a few lists, and in writing this post I’m thinking of one list in particular: my list of the most disgusting batches of tissue samples I have ever had the misfortune to extract DNA from. It is a short but memorable list, which, as of this week, stands at four entries. And despite the large number of scat DNA samples I have worked with over the years, there are no faeces on that list! I thought it was going to be a routine afternoon in the lab. I was planning to take subsamples from some roadkilled mammal ear tissues we had been sent. Roadkills can be a valuable non-invasive source of population genetic information for many species. The procedure goes something like this: take a 2mm subsample of tissue, finely chop it with a scalpel and forceps, and transfer the tissue to a tube with lysis buffer to incubate overnight. I had 48 samples to prepare, so was expecting to spend a couple of hours in the lab, then finish the DNA extractions the next morning. That was the plan…
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Click here to read the full post at WildlifeSNPits:
If you open a few recent journals with a focus on conservation or ecology, the chances are that you won’t be too far away from a paper that uses environmental DNA (eDNA). In fact, Biological Conservation currently has a special issue on environmental DNA as a tool for conservation, which I’ve added to my reading list for #365papers. Genetics has been a handy tool for conservationists for a few decades now, and since the 1990s non-invasive genetic analyses, have become increasingly common. More recently, the revolution in high throughput and massively parallel DNA sequencing technologies has allowed us to tackle questions that were thought impossible even just a few years ago, including complex investigations of mixed environmental samples. You can measure biodiversity from the DNA in a soil or water sample. You can study the diets of cryptic predators through genetic analysis of their faeces. It’s all very exciting! |