Agricultural expansion and intensification are having a huge impact on plant and arthropod diversity and abun-dance,affecting food availability for farmland birds.Difficult food access,in turn,can lead to immunosuppress...Agricultural expansion and intensification are having a huge impact on plant and arthropod diversity and abun-dance,affecting food availability for farmland birds.Difficult food access,in turn,can lead to immunosuppression and a higher incidence of parasites.In the studies designed to examine changes in the diet of birds and their par-asites,metabarcoding is proving particularly useful.This technique requires mini-barcodes capable of amplifying the DNA of target organisms from fecal environmental DNA.To help to understand the impact of agricultural expansion on biodiversity,this study sought to design and identify mini-barcodes that might simultaneously as-sess diet and intestinal parasites from the feces of farmland birds.The capacity to identify diet and parasites of 2 existing and 3 newly developed mini-barcodes was tested“in silico”in relation to the behavior of a reference eukaryotic barcode.Among the newly designed mini-barcodes,MiniB18S_81 showed the higher taxonomic cover-age of eukaryotic taxa and a greater amplification and identification capacity for diet and parasite taxa.Moreover,when it was tested on fecal samples from 5 different steppe bird species,MiniB18S_81 showed high taxonomic resolution of the most relevant diet and parasite phyla,Arthropoda,Nematoda,Platyhelminthes,and Apicomplexa at the order level.Thus,the mini-barcode developed emerges as an excellent tool to simultaneously provide detailed information regarding the diet and parasites of birds,essential for conservation and management.展开更多
基金Xabier Cabodevilla was supported by a PhD grant,financed by the Basque Country Government(Grants no.PRE_2018_2_0273)a contribution to project Sistemática,Biogeografía,Ecología del comportamiento y Evolución(IT1163-19)+1 种基金funded by Basque Country GovernmentAdditional funds for this study were provided by the project 201630E096 funded by CSIC.
文摘Agricultural expansion and intensification are having a huge impact on plant and arthropod diversity and abun-dance,affecting food availability for farmland birds.Difficult food access,in turn,can lead to immunosuppression and a higher incidence of parasites.In the studies designed to examine changes in the diet of birds and their par-asites,metabarcoding is proving particularly useful.This technique requires mini-barcodes capable of amplifying the DNA of target organisms from fecal environmental DNA.To help to understand the impact of agricultural expansion on biodiversity,this study sought to design and identify mini-barcodes that might simultaneously as-sess diet and intestinal parasites from the feces of farmland birds.The capacity to identify diet and parasites of 2 existing and 3 newly developed mini-barcodes was tested“in silico”in relation to the behavior of a reference eukaryotic barcode.Among the newly designed mini-barcodes,MiniB18S_81 showed the higher taxonomic cover-age of eukaryotic taxa and a greater amplification and identification capacity for diet and parasite taxa.Moreover,when it was tested on fecal samples from 5 different steppe bird species,MiniB18S_81 showed high taxonomic resolution of the most relevant diet and parasite phyla,Arthropoda,Nematoda,Platyhelminthes,and Apicomplexa at the order level.Thus,the mini-barcode developed emerges as an excellent tool to simultaneously provide detailed information regarding the diet and parasites of birds,essential for conservation and management.
