fundamentals of eDNA

This week, my project group chose to have the class read the 2017 Williams et al. paper “Isothermal amplification of environmental DNA (eDNA) for direct field-based monitoring and laboratory confirmation of Dreissena sp.”. We chose this paper because while the technology of Loop-mediated Isothermal Amplification (LAMP) is not a new one in the biological field, we were interested in how it is now being applied to newer techniques such as eDNA, and thought it was a good example of how technologies may be developed in the sciences for one application and can be adapted as time progresses. I personally found the paper to be interesting because it was one of the few that we found where they were identifying marine animals using this technology. In doing background research on LAMP prior to reading the paper, one concept that stood out to me was the idea that you can perform this amplification method on crude samples and you may not always have to complete a DNA extraction protocol ahead of time. While i could easily imagine this succeeding in a setting where there was a high concentration of the target DNA or RNA to begin with in the sample, I had a hard time imagining how that may work on an eDNA sample. Because of that curiosity, I appreciated the comparison that this paper did in testing samples that were extracted prior to conducting LAMP and those that were not. While it is not surprising that they saw a higher amplification rate of the filtered water samples than the direct amplifcation samples, the fact that they did have some amplification provides a nice framework for how one may continue to advance this application in the future.