eDNA

Traditional ecological surveys of freshwater communities require many hours of painstaking work, usually by species experts and trained assistants, to identify the species of many specimens collected in the field. With pondweeds, they normally examine the physical features, such as fruiting structures, under a microscope to determine the species.

A research team in Canada has tested the use of environmental DNA (eDNA) to speed up the process of identifying and surveying these and other aquatic plants. The researchers in the current study developed and tested new genetic markers and methods to detect pondweeds using eDNA, which is made up of the ....