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.

Friday, March 6, 2015

Got a second gene!

We could finally amplify a second gene from the DNA of the samples collected last year. This was a fragment of the mitochondrial gene Cytochrome Oxidase I (COI). This gene is the standard for the Barcode of Life project (at least for metazoans), but problems with the universality of the primers and the obtained sequence length made it less used in metabarcoding applications.
The agarose gel of the COI amplification

Starting from published primers and modifying them through database mining, we obtained highly degenerate primers that amplified successfully in all samples. We will now send this DNA for high throughput sequencing

We cannot wait to have the results and compare them with what we get with the 18S gene. It is reasonable to expect that a multi-locus approach will give us the best picture of the biodiversity present.
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