Welcome to the METABARPARK Project website. The project aims to apply the new high throughput sequencing technologies to characterize benthic communities in the Spanish Marine National Parks using environmental DNA (metabarcoding). Our main objective is to characterize the hidden biodiversity which is usually overlooked by traditional methods. We will also try to assess the community impacts of invasive seaweeds.

Thursday, March 5, 2015

Drowned in sequences!

Well, we did receive in February the sequences of 18S of the first round of samples from Islas Cíes and Cabrera... not bad to start with: over 14 million sequences!!


Now we are working in the analyses of this huge amount of data. We had to filter out bad quality reads, sequencing errors, and contaminants. Then we combined all sequences that were equal.

From this we went on and grouped similar sequences in Molecular Operational Taxonomic Units, our proxy for species, and our raw data for ecological analyses. These MOTUs were assigned a taxonomy using reference databases in GenBank

We had to fight a little bit with the different programs and pipelines, we wrote some code, and kept the processors of the CEAB computer cluster busy for some time. But we got finally over 4200 MOTUs!!! our preliminary analyses showed a clear distinction in biodiversity structure in both parks, and also between communities.

We are excited about the amount of MOTUs we obtained, and are looking forward to start the ecological/biodiversity analyses... will keep you updated!
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)