Environmental DNA approach to assess phytoplankton communities in lake environments
Résumé
Aquatic ecosystems play an important role in the well-being of human populations through ecosystem services. However, the development of human activities increases the eutrophication of lakes and rivers having a negative impact on human health. Thus, maintaining clean ecosystems without altering their biodiversity is one of the main issues nowadays. The Water Framework Directive (WFD) require the monitoring of ecological quality in order to assess the level of pollution in lakes following anthropogenic pressures. Phytoplankton is a photosynthetic bioindicator playing an important role in the biosphere and aquatic ecosystems function because it provides energy to organisms constituting the upper levels of the aquatic food web through its photosynthetic activity. In this context, the PhytoDOM project aims to identify phytoplankton in overseas water bodies in order to develop a method and tools to analyse ecological status using environmental DNA (eDNA). An indicator, based on the estimation of ecological profiles of diatoms identified using eDNA approach, has already been successfully used to assess the ecological status of rivers. Here we tested the same type of biological indicator on lake phytoplankton communities. This was made possible by the use of a dataset from around 100 waterbodies across France. Phytoplankton communities were characterized using a metabarcoding approach. Analyses were carried out without taxonomic assignment. The taxonomy-free approach can be explained by the lack of data in libraries reducing the percentage of assignment to precise taxonomic levels. The indicator obtained by Taxonomy-Free has been tested and could be an alternative to traditional microscopic methods.
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