Tuesday, July 12, 2016

The methods developed for metabarcoding of hard bottom communities explained in an international book chapter

by Xavier Turon

Owen Wangensteen and Xavier Turon have been invited to write a chapter in the book "Marine Animal Forests. The Ecology of Benthic Biodiversity Hotspots", of the Springer International Publishing Company (ISBN: 978-3-319-17001-5), which is edited by Sergio Rossi, Lorenzo Bramanti, Andrea Gori and Covadonga Orejas. In this chapter, entitled "Metabarcoding techniques for assessing biodiversity of marine animal forests", Owen and Xavier explain the methods developed for analysing hard bottom communities using metabarcoding. We believe that it is crucial to setup standardized protocols, and that this book can be an excellent platform to share and disseminate our experience with the different steps of the metabarcoding process.

This chapter is now accepted for publication, and we foresee that it will be published in the forthcoming months.

Techniques developed in METABARPARK, such as the size fractionation of the samples, can be adopted by other teams working on metabarcoding of marine benthos.