An accessible metagenomic strategy allows for better characterization of invertebrate bulk samples

Abstract

DNA-based techniques are a popular approach for assessing biodiversity in ecological research, especially for organisms which are difficult to detect or identify morphologically. Metabarcoding, the most established method for determining species composition and relative abundance in bulk samples, can be more sensitive and time- and cost effective than traditional morphological approaches. However, one drawback of this method is PCR bias caused by between-species variation in the amplification efficiency of a marker gene. Metagenomics, bypassing PCR amplification, has been proposed as an alternative to overcome this bias. Several studies have already shown the promising potential of metagenomics, but they all indicate the unavailability of reference genomes for most species in any ecosystem as one of the primary bottlenecks preventing its wider implementation. In this study, we present a strategy that uses unassembled reads of low-coverage whole genome sequencing to construct a genomic reference database, thus circumventing high sequencing costs and intensive bioinformatic processing. We show that this approach is superior to metabarcoding for approximating relative biomass of macrobenthos species from bulk samples. Furthermore, these results can be obtained with a sequencing effort comparable to metabarcoding. The strategy presented here can thus accelerate the implementation of metagenomics in biodiversity assessments, as it should be relatively easy to adopt by laboratories familiar with metabarcoding and can be used as an accessible alternative.