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A new molecular diagnostic tool for surveying and monitoring Triops cancriformis populations

The tadpole shrimp, Triops cancriformis, is a freshwater crustacean listed as endangered in the UK and Europe living in ephemeral pools. Populations are threatened by habitat destruction due to land development for agriculture and increased urbanisation. Despite this, there is a lack of efficient me...

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Autores principales: Sellers, Graham S., Griffin, Larry R., Hänfling, Bernd, Gómez, Africa
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: PeerJ Inc. 2017
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5429740/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28507815
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3228
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author Sellers, Graham S.
Griffin, Larry R.
Hänfling, Bernd
Gómez, Africa
author_facet Sellers, Graham S.
Griffin, Larry R.
Hänfling, Bernd
Gómez, Africa
author_sort Sellers, Graham S.
collection PubMed
description The tadpole shrimp, Triops cancriformis, is a freshwater crustacean listed as endangered in the UK and Europe living in ephemeral pools. Populations are threatened by habitat destruction due to land development for agriculture and increased urbanisation. Despite this, there is a lack of efficient methods for discovering and monitoring populations. Established macroinvertebrate monitoring methods, such as net sampling, are unsuitable given the organism’s life history, that include long lived diapausing eggs, benthic habits and ephemerally active populations. Conventional hatching methods, such as sediment incubation, are both time consuming and potentially confounded by bet-hedging hatching strategies of diapausing eggs. Here we develop a new molecular diagnostic method to detect viable egg banks of T. cancriformis, and compare its performance to two conventional monitoring methods involving diapausing egg hatching. We apply this method to a collection of pond sediments from the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust Caerlaverock National Nature Reserve, which holds one of the two remaining British populations of T. cancriformis. DNA barcoding of isolated eggs, using newly designed species-specific primers for a large region of mtDNA, was used to estimate egg viability. These estimates were compared to those obtained by the conventional methods of sediment and isolation hatching. Our method outperformed the conventional methods, revealing six ponds holding viable T. cancriformis diapausing egg banks in Caerlaverock. Additionally, designed species-specific primers for a short region of mtDNA identified degraded, inviable eggs and were used to ascertain the levels of recent mortality within an egg bank. Together with efficient sugar flotation techniques to extract eggs from sediment samples, our molecular method proved to be a faster and more powerful alternative for assessing the viability and condition of T. cancriformis diapausing egg banks.
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spelling pubmed-54297402017-05-15 A new molecular diagnostic tool for surveying and monitoring Triops cancriformis populations Sellers, Graham S. Griffin, Larry R. Hänfling, Bernd Gómez, Africa PeerJ Aquaculture, Fisheries and Fish Science The tadpole shrimp, Triops cancriformis, is a freshwater crustacean listed as endangered in the UK and Europe living in ephemeral pools. Populations are threatened by habitat destruction due to land development for agriculture and increased urbanisation. Despite this, there is a lack of efficient methods for discovering and monitoring populations. Established macroinvertebrate monitoring methods, such as net sampling, are unsuitable given the organism’s life history, that include long lived diapausing eggs, benthic habits and ephemerally active populations. Conventional hatching methods, such as sediment incubation, are both time consuming and potentially confounded by bet-hedging hatching strategies of diapausing eggs. Here we develop a new molecular diagnostic method to detect viable egg banks of T. cancriformis, and compare its performance to two conventional monitoring methods involving diapausing egg hatching. We apply this method to a collection of pond sediments from the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust Caerlaverock National Nature Reserve, which holds one of the two remaining British populations of T. cancriformis. DNA barcoding of isolated eggs, using newly designed species-specific primers for a large region of mtDNA, was used to estimate egg viability. These estimates were compared to those obtained by the conventional methods of sediment and isolation hatching. Our method outperformed the conventional methods, revealing six ponds holding viable T. cancriformis diapausing egg banks in Caerlaverock. Additionally, designed species-specific primers for a short region of mtDNA identified degraded, inviable eggs and were used to ascertain the levels of recent mortality within an egg bank. Together with efficient sugar flotation techniques to extract eggs from sediment samples, our molecular method proved to be a faster and more powerful alternative for assessing the viability and condition of T. cancriformis diapausing egg banks. PeerJ Inc. 2017-05-11 /pmc/articles/PMC5429740/ /pubmed/28507815 http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3228 Text en ©2017 Sellers et al. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
spellingShingle Aquaculture, Fisheries and Fish Science
Sellers, Graham S.
Griffin, Larry R.
Hänfling, Bernd
Gómez, Africa
A new molecular diagnostic tool for surveying and monitoring Triops cancriformis populations
title A new molecular diagnostic tool for surveying and monitoring Triops cancriformis populations
title_full A new molecular diagnostic tool for surveying and monitoring Triops cancriformis populations
title_fullStr A new molecular diagnostic tool for surveying and monitoring Triops cancriformis populations
title_full_unstemmed A new molecular diagnostic tool for surveying and monitoring Triops cancriformis populations
title_short A new molecular diagnostic tool for surveying and monitoring Triops cancriformis populations
title_sort new molecular diagnostic tool for surveying and monitoring triops cancriformis populations
topic Aquaculture, Fisheries and Fish Science
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5429740/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/28507815
http://dx.doi.org/10.7717/peerj.3228
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