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RE: Scientists have a new tool to identified species; by sequencing environmental DNA (eDNA) to find all the species that lives in the environment
I'm only passingly familiar with eDNA, but it seems like it a useful tool for a lot of applications, particularly conservation, as you wrote.
As far as I understand, it's basically a presence/absence thing, right? So it might not be ideal (at least in the microbial systems I deal with) for doing things like population turnover, differentiating live/dead populations, or gene expression. Still a very interesting tool, though.
Yes, I believe that is correct. From what I read, it will not really be able to be used to determine concentrations of the different species at this point.
I would imagine that it could be very useful for microbiology, but it might not be as precise as you might need it to be yet. But I could see that it might be useful for quickly determining if a soil or water sample has a presence of a certain microbe, like if you want to quickly find out if there's a dangerous organism in your drinking water. I'm far from caught up in the latest microbiology technology, but don't they often still grow cultures on agar to find out if a species is present?