While environmental DNA has great potential to change many aspects of ecosystem management, it remains a relatively ‘young’ technology and lacks a standardised base of methods. As a result, eDNA results from different labs and studies are often not directly comparable, undermining the potential for incorporation into governmental legislation.
The field of ancient DNA has developed many standardised techniques that are highly effective at detecting trace amounts of genetic signal amongst extremely high levels of background. These methods are optimised for very short DNA fragments (<200bp) that comprise the vast majority of eDNA - but remain undetectable with standard metabarcoding approaches.
We have used ancient DNA approaches to develop a largescale Hybridisation Capture (HybCap) Array that can provide a detailed analysis of all MDB fish, waterbirds, molluscs, threatened mammals and herps, insect ecological indicators, plus important pathogens and biosecurity species - in a single analysis for around $300. The HybCap provides presence/absence information, as well as phylogeographic structure (migration, recruitment, dispersal etc) and can be quickly be modified for any new genetic target (eg avian influenza strain detection, cane toads, fire ants, blue green algae toxins). One of the biggest advantages is that the method is very simple and cheap, allowing standardisation across any lab or sample – producing comparable eDNA datasets and studies across Australia.