The shared performance of different COI regions increases the niche breadth detectable from bat guano eDNA
Marcele Laux1, Ana Cláudia Jardelino2,3, Santelmo Vasconcelos1,4
1Instituto Tecnológico Vale, Belém, PA, Brazil.
None:
The cytochrome c oxidase subunit I (COI), widely adopted as a DNA barcode for Metazoa, exhibits distinct variation levels in different regions within the gene. We investigated the efficacy of combining three arthropod-specific primers to enhance the detection of dietary niches, as opposed to relying on a single primer. This study utilized bat guano collected in bat caves from the Amazon and Caatinga biomes in Brazil. The UEA2-UEA3, UEA3-UEA4, and UEA5-UEA6 primer pairs recovered distinct proportions of Arthropoda (10%, 57%, and 42%, respectively) and exhibited considerable levels of unassigned reads (29%, 33%, and 42%, respectively) and non-target sequences (61%, 10%, and 16%, respectively). The UEA2-UEA3 primarily recovered Chiroptera (57%) but demonstrated the highest taxonomic coverage and richness for Arthropoda. On the other hand, UEA3-UEA4 and UEA5-UEA6 showed the highest α-diversity for Arthropoda; however, UEA5-UEA6 predominantly recovered Lepidoptera (40%) with the highest number of unique Arthropoda genera (45%), while UEA3-UEA4 mostly assigned to Lepidoptera and Diptera. Our results suggest the use of more than one primer pair and show that the analysis of only one primer pair can generate biased outputs. The choice primer is a crucial step in eDNA studies, especially for complex samples such as bat guano.
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