Skip to main content
Entomology 2020 Main banner
Icon Legend
This session is not in your schedule.
This session is in your schedule. Click again to remove it.
Presentation Icons
Plenary
Plenary
Livestream
Livestream
On-Demand
On-Demand
Student Competition
Student Competition
Video Chat
Video Chat
Panel Discussion
Panel Discussion
Mixer
Mixer
Poster Icons
Poster
Poster
Student Competition
Student Competition

SysEB

Poster

Category: Poster

Poster: SysEB

Comparing the effectiveness of eDNA sampling of water to bulk sample ethanol supernatant for the assessment of freshwater macroinvertebrate communities

Poster
The use of environmental DNA (eDNA) to measure invertebrate populations is a relatively new method of biomonitoring. This approach typically includes collecting water samples from various microhabitats in an aquatic ecosystem and then filtering, extracting, amplifying, and sequencing DNA from those samples. A recently suggested alternative is to filter DNA from the ethanol that terrestrial and kick samples are preserved in, and then follow the same pipeline. For this project, we are comparing the results of eDNA sampling from both ethanol and water samples collected from 6 sites located in and near Utah County (Utah, USA), throughout the summer of 2020. We have filtered, extracted, amplified and will sequence COI invertebrate barcodes from 6 replicates of Malaise trap ethanol samples, 3 replicates of ethanol-preserved kick samples, and 6 replicates of water samples from all 6 of our sites. We believe this will give us statistical power to determine the difference between the detection of species via ethanol and water sampling, and will help inform methodologies for eDNA biomonitoring studies in the future. Although we are awaiting sequencing results, we predict results will be comparable (though the water samples may show more sensitivity towards hard-bodied invertebrates) and will identify OTUs not typically found in sub-sampling.