An air quality monitoring station like this one at Auchencoast Moss near Edinburgh, UK collects DNA from the environment.
National Institute of Physics / Local Site Operator
Thanks to new environmental DNA techniques, air samples collected at pollution monitoring stations could provide a wealth of data on animal and plant ecology.
Environmental DNA (eDNA) is obtained from shed cells left in air, water, soil, waste products, and blood. Methods for detecting it have revolutionized wildlife research in recent decades. Instead of having to physically observe and capture animals to confirm their presence, we can now simply analyze the DNA they leave behind.
While these methods are worthy of attention, they are still too intensive to perform at the very wide and regular scales needed to track the rise and decline of species over time. But new approaches could change all that by using samples that are already routinely taken and sometimes stored for decades to track air pollution.
James Allerton of the National Physical Laboratory in Teddington, UK, read a report on eDNA collection using air filters and found it very similar to his own work on monitoring air quality. said. He reached out to the biologists behind the report to prove that an international team had conducted experiments and that air pollution monitoring stations inadvertently collected and stored DNA samples that can now be analyzed.
“It seemed like a no-brainer,” he says. “This is a really good lesson. Read around your subject, and read outside your subject as well.”
His collaborator, Elizabeth Clare of York University in Toronto, Canada, said the new technique could detect not only declines in native species but also gains in invasive species, a hitherto unknown. It will also reveal entirely new organisms and plants. Chemistry.
For testing, the team removed filters from air monitors in London and Auchencoast Moss near Edinburgh, England, and stored them for eight months before analyzing their DNA. They identified DNA from over 180 different plants, fungi, insects, mammals, birds, fish and amphibians. These included hedgehogs, badgers, newts, songbirds, trees, and arable crops.
Clare and his colleagues are now seeking archives of standardized 47-millimeter air filters from government and private agencies around the world in hopes of building a global database of historical and contemporary biodiversity information. I’m here.
“I spoke with someone who has over half a million copies of these in storage,” she says. “There are probably millions of them archived around the world.”
Douglas Yu of the University of East Anglia, UK, says that while being able to create new datasets from past samples is useful, perhaps the technology’s biggest advantage will be how it will be easier to collect samples in the future. . This could help monitor the success of efforts to restore biodiversity, he says.
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