Autoria: PAULA, D. P.; BARROS, S. K. A.; PITTA, R. M.; BARRETO, M. R.; TOGAWA, R. C.; ANDOW, D. A.

Resumo: Abstract: A central challenge of DNA gut content analysis is to identify prey in a highly degraded DNA community. In this study, weevaluated prey detection using metabarcoding and a method of mapping unassembled shotgun reads (Lazaro). Inamockpreycommunity,metabarcodingdidnotdetectanyprey,probablyowingtoprimerchoiceand/orpreferentialpredator DNA amplification, while Lazaro detected prey with accuracy 43?71%. Gut content analysis of field-collected arthropod epigeal predators (3 ants, 1 dermapteran, and 1 carabid) from agricultural habitats in Brazil (27 samples, 46?273 individuals per sample) revealed that 64% of the prey species detections by either method were not confirmed by melting curve analysis and 87% of the true prey were detected in common. We hypothesized that Lazaro would detect fewer true- and false-positive and more false-negative prey with greater taxonomic resolution than metabarcoding but found that the methods were similar in sensitivity, specificity, false discovery rate, false omission rate, and accuracy.There was a positive correlation between the relative prey DNA concentration in the samples and the number of prey reads detected by Lazaro,while this was inconsistent for metabarcoding. Metabarcoding and Lazaro had similar,but partially complementary,detection of prey in arthropod predator guts.However, while Lazaro wasalmost2×moreexpensive,thenumberofreadswasrelatedtotheamountofpreyDNA,suggestingthatLazaro mayprovide quantitative prey information while metabarcoding did not.

Ano de publicação: 2022

Tipo de publicação: Artigo de periódico

Unidade: Embrapa Agrossilvipastoril

Palavras-chave: Diet analysis, Environmental DNA, Generalist predators, Gut content analysis