TY - JOUR
T1 - A DNA metabarcoding approach to characterize soil arthropod communities
AU - Oliverio, Angela M.
AU - Gan, Huijie
AU - Wickings, Kyle
AU - Fierer, Noah
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Annise Dobson, Maya Montoya-Pimolwatana, Matt Gebert, and Jessica Henley for assistance with soil collection, sample processing and laboratory work. This project was funded by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to AMO, a grant from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute to NF, and a grant from the US Department of Agriculture to KW.
Funding Information:
We thank Annise Dobson, Maya Montoya-Pimolwatana, Matt Gebert, and Jessica Henley for assistance with soil collection, sample processing and laboratory work. This project was funded by an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to AMO, a grant from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute to NF, and a grant from the US Department of Agriculture to KW.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 Elsevier Ltd
PY - 2018/10
Y1 - 2018/10
N2 - Belowground arthropod communities are diverse and our ability to characterize them remains logistically difficult and time consuming. Molecular metabarcoding techniques are routinely used to assess the diversity of both microbial and some ‘macrobial’ taxa across a range of environments, but the use of such techniques for characterizing soil arthropod diversity remains limited. Here we used three approaches to profile soil arthropod communities at the family level of resolution across 10 distinct sites via morphological identification, metabarcoding of DNA from the extracted arthropods, and metabarcoding directly from bulk soils. Although the three methods differed to some degree in their ability to detect some individual taxa, we found that all three methods yielded well-correlated site-level estimates of diversity (Spearman's ρ ≥ 0.63 with P < 0.05 for all correlations) and overall arthropod community composition (Mantel ρ ≥ 0.45 with P < 0.05). Of particular note is that DNA extracted directly from bulk soil yielded results comparable to analyses of DNA from extracted arthropods. Thus, DNA metabarcoding of bulk soil will likely be a useful tool for those researchers looking to incorporate multi-domain comparisons or for studies that require rapid assessments of arthropod diversity across a large number of soil samples.
AB - Belowground arthropod communities are diverse and our ability to characterize them remains logistically difficult and time consuming. Molecular metabarcoding techniques are routinely used to assess the diversity of both microbial and some ‘macrobial’ taxa across a range of environments, but the use of such techniques for characterizing soil arthropod diversity remains limited. Here we used three approaches to profile soil arthropod communities at the family level of resolution across 10 distinct sites via morphological identification, metabarcoding of DNA from the extracted arthropods, and metabarcoding directly from bulk soils. Although the three methods differed to some degree in their ability to detect some individual taxa, we found that all three methods yielded well-correlated site-level estimates of diversity (Spearman's ρ ≥ 0.63 with P < 0.05 for all correlations) and overall arthropod community composition (Mantel ρ ≥ 0.45 with P < 0.05). Of particular note is that DNA extracted directly from bulk soil yielded results comparable to analyses of DNA from extracted arthropods. Thus, DNA metabarcoding of bulk soil will likely be a useful tool for those researchers looking to incorporate multi-domain comparisons or for studies that require rapid assessments of arthropod diversity across a large number of soil samples.
KW - CO1 metabarcoding
KW - Environmental DNA sequencing
KW - Morphological identification
KW - Soil DNA
KW - Soil arthropods
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U2 - 10.1016/j.soilbio.2018.06.026
DO - 10.1016/j.soilbio.2018.06.026
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85049474763
SN - 0038-0717
VL - 125
SP - 37
EP - 43
JO - Soil Biology and Biochemistry
JF - Soil Biology and Biochemistry
ER -