week 4 blog reflection
Reflection on ‘Aquatic suspended particulate matter as source of eDNA for fish metabarcoding’
This article discusses the idea of obtaining samples from suspended particulate matter as a kind of compromise between soil sampling or water sampling. Whereas water sampling contains more contemporary, possibly relevant information, soil sampling contains higher amounts of eDNA. The article claims suspended particulate matter, which as the name suggests is particulate matter suspended in water, to have both high eDNA content as well as being ‘contemporary’, although I was unsure how contemporary it was, and I don’t believe in the paper it specifies this. My main issue with the paper was that, from my perspectice as a lame-man, it was, and is, hard for me to really visualize or understand suspended particulate matter. I was not aware of this term before the paper, and I don’t think the paper did an adequate job, or really attempted, to explain or give images to what particulate matter is, or for that matter, why it hasn’t been used often for sampling. This has left me with a limited ability to truly understand the relevance and importance of the results in this paper.