Nucleic acids-based tools for ballast water surveillance, monitoring, and research

Journal of Sea Research
John A Darling, Raymond M Frederick

Abstract

Understanding the risks of biological invasion posed by ballast water-whether in the context of compliance testing, routine monitoring, or basic research-is fundamentally an exercise in biodiversity assessment, and as such should take advantage of the best tools available for tackling that problem. The past several decades have seen growing application of genetic methods for the study of biodiversity, driven in large part by dramatic technological advances in nucleic acids analysis. Monitoring approaches based on such methods have the potential to increase dramatically sampling throughput for biodiversity assessments, and to improve on the sensitivity, specificity, and taxonomic accuracy of traditional approaches. The application of targeted detection tools (largely focused on PCR but increasingly incorporating novel probe-based methodologies) has led to a paradigm shift in rare species monitoring, and such tools have already been applied for early detection in the context of ballast water surveillance. Rapid improvements in community profiling approaches based on high throughput sequencing (HTS) could similarly impact broader efforts to catalogue biodiversity present in ballast tanks, and could provide novel opportunities to b...Continue Reading

Citations

Sep 6, 2020·The Science of the Total Environment·Sofia DuarteFilipe O Costa
May 29, 2021·Marine Pollution Bulletin·Zhaozhao XueWei Zhang
Jun 22, 2018·Environmental Science & Technology·Ernest R Blatchley IiiNicholas Welschmeyer

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Methods Mentioned

BETA
NISA
PCR
Laser Transmission Spectroscopy
nucleic acid extraction
flow cytometry
PMA

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