Have a look at the paper, and visit insitulabs.org to learn more about the project and decentralised labs ❤️

👏 👏 to all coauthors. I feel very lucky to be part of such a fantastic project!

Using portable and low-cost sequencing in the field can help address biodiversity barcoding biases seen in many biodiverse regions, where local researchers often rely on foreign institutions to process their samples.

In this study, we generated over 1,800 publicly available barcodes for Amazonian vertebrate 🦇 and plant 🌿 taxa.

Of these, 30 mammal and 196 bird barcodes were the first ones for that species! 🤯

This is work I was involved in when I moved to the field for some months a few years ago to help set up one of the field genetics labs in Peru with @fieldprojects.org @surroundscience.bsky.social

Together with the growing number of genome reference assemblies and specialised bioinformatics tools being shared and developed, we believe our study shows how much potential metagenomics approaches hold for #BiodiversityMonitoring and #ConservationGenomics.

🌿 The metagenomic data also allowed us to taxonomically classify some of the "by-catch" plant DNA present in the samples, and explore potential plant-arthropod interactions.

🐝 High coverage bulkDNA genomes were further explored by analysing their mitochondrial allele frequency distributions, which indicated the presence of several individuals with different haplotypes within the same sample.

We obtained #bulkDNA genomes from the samples and used them to calculate genome-wide heterozygosities and - by comparing their genomic profile to previously published genomes - confirm their geographic population of origin 🌎.

In this study, we used a comprehensive, custom-built, terabyte-scale #Kraken2 database (also publicly available) to taxonomically classify all reads before mapping to selected references.

🧬 Through shotgun sequencing, metagenomics can help us go from a barcode to a full genome, and unlock insights like genetic diversity and population structure.

🧬 Metabarcoding is exceptionally good at detecting species, especially at low abundance, and it's widespread use means thousands of barcode species references are publicly available.