Jen Elana Quick-Cleveland | ASBMBToday | October 12, 2022
An estimated 9 million kinds of plants, animals, protists and fungi live on Earth. Biodiversity loss is a major problem associated with human-made climate change. The current global rate of extinction is predicted to be nearly 100 times the baseline rate. But measuring those extinctions, or even accurately measuring the organisms that make up an ecosystem, is a challenge, since biodiversity assessment must include species from communities that cannot be observed by eye.
CALeDNA (pronounced cal-ee-DNA) is a partnership of scientists, universities and nonprofits focused on measuring ecosystems’ biodiversity and how ecosystems change over space and time. To do this, they isolate environmental DNA, or eDNA — which organisms shed into the ecosystem — from water, soil or sediment samples. They use a method called metabarcoding to amplify and sequence specific genetic loci including ribosomes, internal transcribed spacers, and cytochromes and then identify a list of species with eDNA in each sample. Sample collections are archived at University of California labs as a resource for future projects.
Read “CALeDNA: Tracking biodiversity at the molecular level“