fundamentals of eDNA

I’m not gonna lie, the bioinformatics stuff is hard for me to grasp. I thought the group did a great job of walking us through the differences and different applications of OTU’s and ASV’s and did a great job, overall, of engaging folks. I liked the discussion around data storage and people really sharing from their own experience.

I think this will be a great discussion to return to if/when I do my own metabarcoding work. I’m still unsure if that’s going to be a part of my dissertation work or not. I’m also still unclear about the dada2 package and analysis of this kind of data. It’s all completely new to me and I haven’t gone through the process myself, so it’s always hard to make the connections without having learned the process.

I guess I would say that it would be helpful to have examples where we walk through these methods step by step and then all the way through data interpretation and analysis. Even if it’s pretend data, but applicable to the eDNA project. I’m still missing the connection of the pipeline for collection of samples, the processing of those samples, and then the analysis and interpretation of the data we get from those samples. There are different parts that are addressed each week, but not all parts.