Identifying species in faeces: a novel DNA metabarcoding approach using ONT MinION.

Accurate and reliable dietary knowledge is of fundamental importance when wanting to understand an organisms' ecology and life history. As such, a plethora of indirect, often invasive, strategies and methods to quantify diet components in animals has been developed. However, most of these methods suffer from prey bias and limited accuracy, in addition to being labour intensive and requiring taxonomic expertise to correctly assign prey items to their correct taxonomic unit. In an attempt to evade these limitations, DNA-based methods, particularly DNA metabarcoding, have been suggested as a viable alternative to study dietary ecology. The majority of metabarcoding studies to date engage specialized facilities employing short-read platforms to perform these studies, but the new, portable, low-cost MinION from Oxford Nanopore Technologies' is shifting the paradigm. The proposed study seeks to develop a time- and cost effective approach to correctly evaluate dietary composition in the field, using the MinION.

Keywords:NON-VERTEBRATES, DNA-BARCODING, FEEDING ECOLOGY

Disciplines:Animal biology not elsewhere classified, Genetics not elsewhere classified