ARPHA Conference Abstracts :
Conference Abstract
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Corresponding author: Christina Wiebe (christina.wiebe@uni-rostock.de)
Received: 24 Feb 2021 | Published: 04 Mar 2021
© 2021 Christina Wiebe, Petra Nowak, Hendrik Schubert
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:
Wiebe C, Nowak P, Schubert H (2021) Development of specific markers for the detection of Tolypella canadensis eDNA in water samples. ARPHA Conference Abstracts 4: e64932. https://doi.org/10.3897/aca.4.e64932
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Assessing the biodiversity of an ecosystem plays a major role in ecosystem management. However, proper determination on species-level is often tricky when morphological features are scarce and especially rare species require huge sampling efforts to be detected in the aquatic realm. As an alternative to conventional methods, environmental samples can be examined via the eDNA method, allowing for large-scale integration as well as taxa resolution independent from expression of morphological characters. However, to apply this technique genetic markers that are specific to a species or at least a genus are required. Such markers until now have been successfully developed only for a few well studied taxonomic groups like, e.g., fishes and amphibians, but are still missing for others, especially plants and algae (e.g.
This project focusses on the development of species-specific markers for the macrophytic green algae Tolypella canadensis (Characeae, Charophyta), a rare alga preferring deep water and known so far mainly from remote places. Tolypella canadensis is a circumpolar species and prefers oligotrophic lakes, where it grows in depths up to 13 m (
The design of the species-specific primers was based on reference nucleotide sequences of the chloroplast genes rbcL, psbC and atpB and of the ribosomal internal transcribed spacer regions ITS1 and ITS2, obtained from GenBank (
Tolypella canadensis-specific primers of the ITS2 region yielded positive PCR amplifications of one single band when T. canadensis was present in a sample. Cross-amplification was not found during the mock test; other charophyte species did not yield positive amplification. The eDNA samples from the Torneträsk validated the performance of the ITS2 marker.
The T. canadensis-specific marker designed in this project was proven to be sensitive and accurate. It could be recommended as a useful tool to detect the presence of T. canadensis DNA, even at low concentration and in complex samples containing other charophyte species.
Tolypella canadensis, Characeae, eDNA, genetic marker, ITS2
Christina Wiebe
1st DNAQUA International Conference (March 9-11, 2021)