Journal
MOLECULAR ECOLOGY RESOURCES
Volume 20, Issue 1, Pages 8-10Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/1755-0998.13122
Keywords
bioinformatics; environmental DNA; infection intensity; Plasmodium; species identification
Ask authors/readers for more resources
Genomic technologies continue to shed light on important ecological and evolutionary questions. Nonetheless, these new tools are applied disproportionately in a small fraction of global biodiversity, partly because of technical challenges to studying highly diverse taxa that occur in low abundances in an environment (e.g., marine and microbial communities). As a result, our understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes lags in many taxa. In a From the Cover manuscript in this issue of Molecular Ecology Resources, Galen, Borner, Williamson, Witt, and Perkins (2020) present a novel approach for characterizing diversity that combines metatranscriptomics with rigorous bioinformatic processing to dramatically improve detection and identification of diverse, low-abundance avian blood parasites. Their approach is an exciting application of available tools that increases our potential for a deeper understanding of diversity in other communities of low-abundance, highly diverse taxa.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available