Detecting animals in the air: environmental DNA sampling expected to pave the way for non-invasive monitoring of terrestrial wild animals
“Capturing airborne environmental DNA from vertebrates makes it possible for us to detect even animals that we cannot see are there,”According to a news release, terrestrial animals can be monitored by many methods, including camera traps, analysis of the environment for footprints or faeces, or in-person observation. Yet these methods “can involve intensive fieldwork and require the animal to be physically present.
“Compared to what people find in rivers and lakes, monitoring airborne DNA is really, really hard, because the DNA seems super diluted in the air,” says Elizabeth Clare, who was lead researcher of the Queen Mary University of London team and is now at York University in Toronto. “But our zoo studies have yet to fail for different samplers, genes, locations, and experimental approaches. All of it worked and surprisingly well.
“Air surrounds everything, and we wanted to avoid contamination in our samples while optimising true detection of animal DNA,” says Bohmann. “Our newest work with airborne eDNA involves what we usually do when processing eDNA samples, just tuned up a little bit.” The fan ingests air from the zoo and its surroundings, which could contain genetic material from “anything that can become airborne and is small enough to continue floating in the air,” says Lynggaard. “After air filtration, we extracted the DNA from the filter and used PCR amplification to make a lot of copies of the animal DNA. After DNA sequencing, we processed the millions of sequences and ultimately compared them to a DNA reference database to identify the animal species.
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