Data from: Improving accuracy of DNA diet estimates using food tissue control materials and an evaluation of proxies for digestion bias ...

Abstract Ecologists are increasingly interested in quantifying consumer diets based on food DNA in dietary samples and high-throughput sequencing of marker genes. It is tempting to assume that food DNA sequence proportions recovered from diet samples are representative of consumer's diet propor...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Thomas, Austen C., Jarman, Simon N., Haman, Katherine H., Trites, Andrew W., Deagle, Bruce E.
Format: Dataset
Language:unknown
Published: The University of British Columbia 2020
Subjects:
Online Access:https://dx.doi.org/10.14288/1.0397556
https://doi.library.ubc.ca/10.14288/1.0397556
Description
Summary:Abstract Ecologists are increasingly interested in quantifying consumer diets based on food DNA in dietary samples and high-throughput sequencing of marker genes. It is tempting to assume that food DNA sequence proportions recovered from diet samples are representative of consumer's diet proportions, despite the fact that captive feeding studies do not support that assumption. Here, we examine the idea of sequencing control materials of known composition along with dietary samples in order to correct for technical biases introduced during amplicon sequencing and biological biases such as variable gene copy number. Using the Ion Torrent PGM©, we sequenced prey DNA amplified from scats of captive harbour seals (Phoca vitulina) fed a constant diet including three fish species in known proportions. Alongside, we sequenced a prey tissue mix matching the seals’ diet to generate tissue correction factors (TCFs). TCFs improved the diet estimates (based on sequence proportions) for all species and reduced the average ...