While the research on environmental DNA and other genetic tools to support aquatic bioassessment progresses rapidly, few of the methods find entry in regulatory biomonitoring. To provide latest information about DNA-based aquatic bioassessment and monitoring to national stakeholders involved especially in the national implementation of European Directives and to assess where end-users from environmental agencies and offices see main challenges at national level, a set of national workshops will be held in parallel and the national languages to facilitate the dialogue just after the conference, on the 12th March 2021.
EnvMetagen, being a long-term partner of DNAqua-net has volunteered to organize this event. You can fin the program and the link to register (deadline March 9th) here: Stakeholder_workshop eDNA Portugal_12032021
Join us!! Let’s contribute to improve biomonitoring of aquatic ecosystems.
]]>This was a great scientific event, with interesting presentations and posters of innovative approaches and groundbreaking results in Metabarcoding and Metagenomics.
A total of 193 participants, representing 85 institutions from 23 countries. We are delighted of this large dissemination of the results of the project.
For more information about TiBE2020 program click here.
]]>The results of the project will inform the political decisions of the European Commission and other decision-makers. The EU is providing three million euros in funding for the project. A virtual kick-off meeting of the project partners took place from 1 – 3 December.
This is a project led by a long term collaborator, Professor Henrique Pereira, a researcher at MLU and iDiv, and we are very proud to be one of the 14 partners of such an ambitious endeavor.
By the end of the project, various options for a European network will have been established for monitoring biodiversity and ecosystems. Using concrete case studies, the team will examine the feasibility of the concepts – from data acquisition and management to reporting to the European Commission. In the future, the system should also make it possible to retrospectively assess the effect of individual nature conservation and restoration measures.
More information about this project on its website.
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For this 10th edition, under the theme of Metabarcoding and Metagenomics, we are going virtual!
The event will take place from 9-11th December 2020, on a dedicated online platform for streaming of the presentations and networking between participants. Abstracts for oral presentations and posters are accepted until October 27th.
Keynote speakers: Mike Schwartz, National Genomics Center for Wildlife and Fish Conservation, USA ; Agnès Bouchez, Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement, France and Tyler Kartzinel, Brown University, USA.
More information on this page, that will be updated frequently.
]]>In an article recently published by Biodiversity Data Journal, we have presented the InBIO Barcoding Initiative Database: Portuguese Bats (Chiroptera) and unveiled the first record of Myotis alcathoe for Portugal.
The presence of this bat species was genetically confirmed through the sequencing of a tissue sample collected in 2005 in the Peneda Gerês National Park, a protected area located in north-western Portugal. This individual had been identified in the field as M. mystacinus, a cryptic species of M. alcathoe, thus demonstrating the difficulty in distinguishing these species, based on external morphological characters alone.
More information and the links to the press articles can be found here.
]]>METABARCODING WITH MinION: SPEEDING UP THE DETECTION OF INVASIVE AQUATIC SPECIES USING ENVIRONMENTAL DNA AND NANOPORE SEQUENCING
Bastian Egeter (CIBIO-InBIO/UP) | July 17, 2020 | 15h30 | CIBIO-InBIO’s – Online, on Zoom
Traditional detection of aquatic invasive species, via morphological identification is often time-consuming and can require a high level of taxonomic expertise, leading to delayed mitigation responses. Environmental DNA (eDNA) detection approaches of multiple species using Illumina-based sequencing technology have been used to overcome these hindrances, but sample processing is often lengthy. More recently, portable nanopore sequencing technology has become available, which has the potential to make molecular detection of invasive species more widely accessible and to substantially decrease sample turnaround times. However, nanopore-sequenced reads have a much higher error rate than those produced by Illumina platforms, which has so far hindered the adoption of this technology. We provide a detailed laboratory protocol and bioinformatic tools to increase the reliability of nanopore sequencing to detect invasive species, and we test its application using invasive bivalves. We sampled water from sites with pre-existing bivalve occurrence and abundance data, and contrasting bivalve communities, in Italy and Portugal. We extracted, amplified and sequenced eDNA with a turnaround of 3.5 days. The majority of processed reads were ≥ 99 % identical to reference sequences. There were no taxa detected other than those known to occur. The lack of detections of some species at some sites could be explained by their known low abundances. This is the first reported use of MinION to detect aquatic invasive species from eDNA samples. The approach can be easily adapted for other metabarcoding applications, such as biodiversity assessment, ecosystem health assessment and diet studies.
]]>A new species of moth as been unveiled by our team and several collaborators. It has been named Mondeguina atlanticella, as it was discovered in the area where the Mondego river, in the center of Portugal, meets the Atlantic ocean.
This is yet another example of the fantastic potential of eDNA and metabarcoding to identify new species.
More information and the link to the press release and the original article can be found here.
This press release has been used in several press articles, listed below.
In this call, all nature lovers participated by taking photos of pollinators, and posting them on the project page in BioDiversity4All.
More information on the project here. It was also widely covered by national press and webzines, and gave rise to a webinar by Sónia Ferreira that can be watched on youtube (in portuguese).
WEBINAR “COMPANIES TOGETHER BY NATURE: ACT4NATURE PORTUGAL”
Pedro Beja (CIBIO-InBIO/UP) | May 22, 2020 | 16h00 | Online, BCSD event
Online Talks about Sustainability is an event promoted by the Business Council for Sustainable Development (BCSD Portugal).
This week, CIBIO’s scientific vice-coordinator, Pedro Beja, will be one of the speakers in a webinar entitled “Companies together by nature: act4nature Portugal”.
The following topics will be addressed in this online session:
– The role of companies in nature protection;
– Presentation of the act4nature Portugal initiative, a joint commitment to the promotion and conservation of biodiversity;
– Clarification session about the project and invitation to companies to participate in this initiative.
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For a quick download of these two publications, just follow the links:
Martins, F. M. S., Galhardo, M., Filipe, A. F., Teixeira, A., Pinheiro, P., Paupério, J., … Beja, P. (2019). Have the cake and eat it: Optimising non‐destructive DNA metabarcoding of macroinvertebrate samples for freshwater biomonitoring. Molecular Ecology Resources, 1755–0998.13012. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/1755-0998.13012
Mata, V. A., Rebelo, H., Amorim, F., Mccracken, G. F., Jarman, S., & Beja, P. (2018). How much is enough? Effects of technical and biological replication on metabarcoding dietary analysis. Molecular Ecology. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/mec.14779
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