Metabarcoding is a cost-effective molecular method for investigating biodiversity in biological and environmental samples by identifying organisms through specific DNA marker regions.

Past applications:

  • Drivers shaping the diversity of fungal communities in the hyperarid Atacama desert (Arens, Zoccarato, et al., 2024).
  • Interaction between host physiology and gut-microbiome in sponges (Britstein et al., 2017; Britstein et al., 2020), 
  • Identify markers of human-related pollution in aquatic environments (Buccheri et al., 2019), monitoring the performances of a waste-water treatment plant (Numberger et al., 2019) and to study the potential spread of pathogenic bacteria (Numberger, Zoccarato et al., 2022). 
  • The interplay of biotic and environmental factors in shaping the composition of aquatic microbial communities (Zoccarato et al., 2016a; Zoccarato et al., 2016b; Celussi et al., 2018).
  • A temporal study of prokaryotic community diversity to examine the effects of extreme weather events (Hoke, Zoccarato et al., 2020).

What analyzes we will do for you:

  • Quality control to filter out low-quality sequences, accompanied by detailed reports and statistics.
  • Error modeling and inference of “true” sequence variants.
  • Taxonomic classification using the appropriate database to the selected primer and research question.
  • Generate “species” tables for your down-stream analyses.
  • Exploratory data analysis with alpha- and beta-diversity plots.