A novel metabarcoding primer pair for environmental DNA analysis of Cephalopoda (Mollusca) targeting the nuclear 18S rRNA region

Daniëlle S.W. De Jonge, Véronique Merten, Till Bayer, Oscar Puebla, Thorsten B.H. Reusch, Henk Jan T. Hoving

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

17 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Cephalopods are pivotal components of marine food webs, but biodiversity studies are hampered by challenges to sample these agile marine molluscs. Metabarcoding of environmental DNA (eDNA) is a potentially powerful technique to study oceanic cephalopod biodiversity and distribution but has not been applied thus far. We present a novel universal primer pair for metabarcoding cephalopods from eDNA, Ceph18S (Forward: 5′-CGC GGC GCT ACA TAT TAG AC-3′, Reverse: 5′-GCA CTT AAC CGA CCG TCG AC-3′). The primer pair targets the hypervariable region V2 of the nuclear 18S rRNA gene and amplifies a relatively short target sequence of approximately 200 bp in order to allow the amplification of degraded DNA. In silico tests on a reference database and empirical tests on DNA extracts from cephalopod tissue estimate that 44-66% of cephalopod species, corresponding to about 310-460 species, can be amplified and identified with this primer pair. A multi-marker approach with the novel Ceph18S and two previously published cephalopod mitochondrial 16S rRNA primer sets targeting the same region (Jarman et al. 2006 Mol. Ecol. Notes. 6, 268-271; Peters et al. 2015 Mar. Ecol. 36, 1428-1439) is estimated to amplify and identify 89% of all cephalopod species, of which an estimated 19% can only be identified by Ceph18S. All sequences obtained with Ceph18S were submitted to GenBank, resulting in new 18S rRNA sequences for 13 cephalopod taxa.

Original languageEnglish
Article number201388
JournalRoyal Society Open Science
Volume8
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 28 Feb 2021

Keywords

  • Cephalopoda
  • environmental DNA
  • metabarcoding
  • universal primer

Fingerprint

Dive into the research topics of 'A novel metabarcoding primer pair for environmental DNA analysis of Cephalopoda (Mollusca) targeting the nuclear 18S rRNA region'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.

Cite this