Development of taxon specific primers for macroinvertebrates in elasmobranch diets
Location
OC Auditorium
Start
4-3-2026 2:45 PM
Type of Presentation
Oral Presentation
Abstract
Understanding animal diets is critical for understanding the trophic roles, food web, and informing conservation management. In elasmobranchs, traditional dietary analysis methods are often lethal or highly invasive, such as stomach content analysis or gastric lavage. Recent dietary studies of elasmobranchs have introduced metabarcoding of prey DNA from fecal samples collected via cloacal swabs. Amplification of prey DNA requires primers that target short fragments (50-300bp) due to the degraded DNA in fecal samples. Universal primers that target broad taxonomic groups are often used in environmental DNA and species identification studies, but existing macroinvertebrate universal primers often exhibit non-specific amplification or fail to amplify due to the high sequence similarity. In this study, primers were developed based on previous literature to specifically target macroinvertebrate prey of Sphyrna tiburo. The resulting primer sets aim to improve the detection of prey diversity and enhance the resolution of metabarcoding-based analyses for dietary studies.
Development of taxon specific primers for macroinvertebrates in elasmobranch diets
OC Auditorium
Understanding animal diets is critical for understanding the trophic roles, food web, and informing conservation management. In elasmobranchs, traditional dietary analysis methods are often lethal or highly invasive, such as stomach content analysis or gastric lavage. Recent dietary studies of elasmobranchs have introduced metabarcoding of prey DNA from fecal samples collected via cloacal swabs. Amplification of prey DNA requires primers that target short fragments (50-300bp) due to the degraded DNA in fecal samples. Universal primers that target broad taxonomic groups are often used in environmental DNA and species identification studies, but existing macroinvertebrate universal primers often exhibit non-specific amplification or fail to amplify due to the high sequence similarity. In this study, primers were developed based on previous literature to specifically target macroinvertebrate prey of Sphyrna tiburo. The resulting primer sets aim to improve the detection of prey diversity and enhance the resolution of metabarcoding-based analyses for dietary studies.