Some early landmark studies

• Main Authors: Taberlet, Pierre, Bonin, Aurélie, Zinger, Lucie, Coissac, Eric
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford University PressOxford 2018
• Subjects: permafrost
• Online Access: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198767220.003.0011; https://academic.oup.com/book/chapter-pdf/51151950/oso-9780198767220-chapter-11.pdf

Abstract Chapter 11 entitled “Some early landmark studies” revisits several seminal articles that paved the way for the field of eDNA research. It first evokes the paper that first coined the expression “environmental DNA” in the late 1980s. Then, it describes how eDNA was first exploited in the early 1990s to reveal an unsuspected microbial diversity that morphology- or cultivation-based methods had failed to reach. In the late 1990s, microbiologists began to explore in several pioneer papers the functional insight provided by “metagenomes” (i.e., the collective genomes found in eDNA samples). In the 2000s, eDNA analysis was finally extended to macroorganisms. Chapter 11 reports such a use in two very different contexts (i.e., the detection of a contemporary invasive species, the bullfrog, and the reconstruction of past plant and animal communities from sediment and permafrost samples).