fundamentals of eDNA

Reflection week 9 blog post

The technology we talked about this week was new to me, and I wish we had more time to talk about it because it seems really interesting! Luckily in my breakout room, Shane was able to talk about benefits of ddPCR over LAMP, and as of right now I think I’m still a bigger fan of ddPCR. I think LAMP could be really valuable for getting accurate numbers, but it still seems very complicated. In terms of understanding, I’d say I understand qPCR really well, ddPCR a little bit, but LAMP seems like a black box… in theory I understand why it exists and what the product looks like, but I would not know where to get started in designing primers or doing this in my own lab. I know this was the last lecture of the semester and there were plans to go over this emerging tech a bit more, but I do hope that it’s something we cover again next semester because I would love to play with these technologies a bit more for my own research! I have a feeling PCR bias is going to really start affecting my research with kelp forest samples (as kelp contains molecules that inhibit PCR), so LAMP might be my saving grace in the future… once I know how to design some primers.