DNA Metabarcoding: how to design and analyse next-generation data for Biodiversity Monitoring

DNA metabarcoding is an innovative method widely used to describe biodiversity patterns and food webs across multiple habitats and ecosystems. It allows the identification of multiple organisms composing complex samples such as air, water, faeces, soil, bulk organisms, through the amplification of taxonomically informative genomic regions. Much progress has been made so far towards the development of this method, fostered by the need for a simple, fast and cost-effective method. Yet its application requires different fields of expertise (traditional and DNA-based taxonomy, molecular biology, NGS technology, bioinformatics, and computational statistics) and consequently uninformed technical decisions can dictate the quality of results. Therefore, in this course we propose to focus on the complexity of each step and provide insights on best practices, while encouraging critical thinking.

The main objective of this course is to provide the basic tools for good experimental design and data processing in DNA metabarcoding.