ITHACA, N.Y. – A team of ecologists and engineers from Cornell University have made a breakthrough in understanding environmental DNA (eDNA) movement in water. Researchers developed synthetic DNA that mimics the behavior of eDNA, released some of it in Cayuga Lake near Cornell University’s Ithaca campus, traced its movement for 33 hours, then incorporated their findings into a new model that can predict where a sampled particle of eDNA likely originated in a water body.
“Over the past 15 years, advances in molecular methods have expanded eDNA from single-species detection to community-wide biodiversity monitoring, often making it faster, cheaper and more sensitive than traditional survey methods,” said Jose Andrés, paper co-author and senior research associate. “One of the key challenges, especially in large freshwater and marine environments where eDNA may be mixed quite deeply into the water column and currents may be strong, is knowing when detected DNA was released by the source organism, and how far away the organism was.”
Environmental DNA is a cheaper, faster, more accurate tool for fish and wildlife managers, as opposed to traditional survey practices like catching animals. Regulators might use eDNA data to determine the environmental impact of an offshore energy installation, to track the population size of an endangered species, to see whether cargo ships are introducing invasive species or to assess the population of a commercially exploited fish species.
“You can’t manage what you can’t measure, and many traditional technologies for measuring biodiversity are hopelessly laborious, expensive or altogether infeasible,” said David Lodge, director of the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability. “The rapid loss of biodiversity in aquatic ecosystems requires effective, scalable tools to assess biodiversity and monitor change over time, and eDNA is certainly one of those tools.”
Funding for this research came from the Cornell Atkinson Center for Sustainability and the U.S. Department of Defense.
For additional information, read this Cornell Chronicle story.
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Environmental Science & Technology