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eDNA project granted by DCE - Danish Centre for Environment and Energy

eDNA as technique for monitoring of invasive species and state of the environment.

Postdoc Susana Santos

Anne Winding, senior scientist, deputy head of department, has received a grant from DCE-Danish Centre for Environment and Energy, Aarhus University, on 657.000 DKK for the project
‘eDNA as technique for monitoring of invasive species and state of the environment’.

Short description of the project and its aim:

The fast development within the area of DNA and RNA techniques combined with the reduction in prices of sequencing analysis have strengthened the interest in wide-spread use of techniques based on environmental DNA (eDNA) for monitoring purposes in addition to research applications.

The NOVANA program is currently under revision and the development of up-to-date techniques that are less expensive and/or provide more detailed information on plants, animals and microorganisms in the environment are asked for.

In the competitive area at both the national and international level it is important and eminent to build a strong unified platform for eDNA analyses at DCE, AU. This includes eDNA of specific species, invertebrates, phytoplankton and microorganisms. The technical issues of eDNA extraction, PCR-primer design and DNA amplification within the different groups of organisms varies. These results need verification and bioinformatic analysis including mirroring the results in various available databases.

However, these databases are often insufficient and some updating of the databases with known sequences can be foreseen. These challenges will be approached in this project in a strong joint collaboration between Department of Environmental Science and Department of Bioscience.

Postdoc Susana Santos works on the project until 31/12-2016.

For further information please contact Anne Winding at aw@envs.au.dk.