ARPHA Conference Abstracts :
Conference Abstract
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Corresponding author: Nadieh de Jonge (ndj@bio.aau.dk)
Received: 22 Feb 2021 | Published: 04 Mar 2021
© 2021 Nadieh de Jonge, Martin Hesselsøe, Jeppe Nielsen
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Citation:
de Jonge N, Hesselsøe M, Nielsen JL (2021) The potential of sediment and fauna microbiomes in water quality assessment. ARPHA Conference Abstracts 4: e64805. https://doi.org/10.3897/aca.4.e64805
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The Water Framework Directive dictates that all European surface waters must have an ecological quality of good or better. The need for regular and comparable ecological quality assessments drives the development of DNA-based approaches for biomonitoring in freshwater systems. Water quality assessments are traditionally based on biological quality elements (BQE) such as fish, plants and other fauna.
Previous studies have shown the potential of metabarcoding as a potential supplement to traditional morphology-based approaches to determine water quality indices. Metabarcoding of the macroinvertebrate community on unsorted bulk samples has the ability to profile freshwater streams into at least 7 water quality categories
The relationship between water quality and microbial communities is well-known, but not well-described. Healthy compositions of microbiota are vital for the functioning of many organisms, and this principle extends to the ecosystem level as well. The microbiome of freshwater streams therefore represents a great untapped potential in the development of DNA-based monitoring methods. The aim of this work was to explore links between water quality, environmental DNA collected from bulk and sediment samples, as well as individual macroinvertebrates with relevance for freshwater streams. Previous work on invertebrate communities
Metabarcoding of freshwater stream bulk and sediment samples has revealed strong parallels to conventional fauna observations in relation to estimations of water quality. Both the invertebrate and microbial community diversity followed the general trend of increasing to a plateau with higher water quality (data not shown). Macroinvertebrate composition (Fig.
Current sequencing platforms and high quality databases combined with advanced statistical analyses have made it possible to begin the development of modified assessment protocols based on DNA analyses, and could potentially lead to entirely new ecological quality indices for the prediction of water quality. Microbes can be very sensitive to environmental changes, and harbour potential indicator organisms for e.g. pollution, and by extension, water quality in a given stream. Microbiome data is abundant, and easy to obtain from all types of environmental samples, including those collected for metabarcoding of existing BQE such as macroinvertebrates. Exploring the use of sediment and fauna microbiomes has the potential to yield a wealth of new information relating to how ecosystems reflect water quality, and may provide additional indicators for use in DNA-based water quality assessment methods.
Metabarcoding, macroinvertebrates, microbial communities, water quality
Nadieh de Jonge
1st DNAQUA International Conference (March 9-11, 2021)