A research team from the Catalan BioGenome Project — composed of members of the Institute for Integrative Systems Biology (I2SysBio, UV–CSIC), the Department of Genetics, Microbiology and Statistics and the Biodiversity Research Institute (IRBio, UB), and the Center for Advanced Studies of Blanes (CEAB–CSIC) — has published a key study in Ecology and Evolution contributing to the field of marine biodiversity genomics.
With the growing interest in whole genome sequencing of eukaryotes, especially understudied species, ensuring high-quality DNA extraction is increasingly essential. This is particularly challenging in organisms collected from remote areas, where samples must be preserved before they can be processed in the lab.
To address this issue, the team used a specimen of the Mediterranean nudibranch Peltodoris atromaculata — commonly known as the sea cow — to test different combinations of tissue preservation methods and DNA extraction protocols. The aim was to identify the most effective conditions for obtaining high-quality DNA suitable for long-read sequencing technologies.
The results highlight the critical role of both the preservation method and the extraction protocol, as their combination can determine the success of DNA recovery. The study identifies several strategies that maximize three key aspects of DNA quality: DNA concentration, fragment length, and purity for amplification.
These approaches were successfully validated in a pilot sequencing run, and the findings are applicable not only to nudibranchs, but also to other species requiring preservation in remote settings before laboratory processing.
Read the full article: https://doi.org/10.1002/ece3.71262