Читать книгу Fundamentals of Conservation Biology - Malcolm L. Hunter Jr. - Страница 120

Environmental DNA, or eDNA, is DNA collected from environmental samples such as soil, water, or even air rather than directly sampled from an individual organism. Such eDNA usually originates from shed skin cells that accumulate in an organism’s environment via feces, mucus, gametes, shed skin, carcasses, and hair. Sometimes, eDNA can be extracted from the meals found in guts of blood‐sucking or predator arthropods. Samples of the environment where organisms of interest might live can be analyzed with DNA sequencing methods, known as metagenomics, for rapid measurement and monitoring of species richness and community composition. eDNA is particularly useful for detecting rare species without having to capture them. The approach may eventually be able to tell us about population size and dynamics and species geographic distribution, but the methods are still under development. A helpful overview on the uses and limitations of eDNA is provided by Cristescu and Hebert (2018).