Combining multi-marker metabarcoding and digital holography to describe eukaryotic plankton across the Newfoundland Shelf
Date
2022
Authors
MacNeil, Liam
Desai, Dhwani K.
Costa, Maycira
LaRoche, Julie
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Scientific Reports
Abstract
The planktonic diversity throughout the oceans is vital to ecosystem functioning and linked to
environmental change. Plankton monitoring tools have advanced considerably with high-throughput
in-situ digital cameras and genomic sequencing, opening new challenges for high-frequency
observations of community composition, structure, and species discovery. Here, we combine multimarker
metabarcoding based on nuclear 18S (V4) and plastidial 16S (V4–V5) rRNA gene amplicons
with a digital in-line holographic microscope to provide a synoptic diversity survey of eukaryotic
plankton along the Newfoundland Shelf (Canada) during the winter transition phase of the North
Atlantic bloom phenomenon. Metabarcoding revealed a rich eukaryotic diversity unidentifiable in
the imaging samples, confirming the presence of ecologically important saprophytic protists which
were unclassifiable in matching images, and detecting important groups unobserved or taxonomically
unresolved during similar sequencing campaigns in the Northwest Atlantic Ocean. In turn, imaging
analysis provided quantitative observations of widely prevalent plankton from every trophic level.
Despite contrasting plankton compositions portrayed by each sampling method, both capture broad
spatial differences between the northern and southern sectors of the Newfoundland Shelf and suggest
complementary estimations of important features in eukaryotic assemblages. Future tasks will involve
standardizing digital imaging and metabarcoding for wider use and consistent, comparable ocean
observations.
Description
Keywords
Computational biology and bioinformatics, Ecology, Molecular biology, Optics and photonics
Citation
MacNeil, L., Desai, D. K., Costa, M., & LaRoche, J. (2022). “Combining multi-marker metabarcoding and digital holography to describe eukaryotic plankton across the Newfoundland Shelf.” Scientific Reports, 12(13078). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-17313-w