• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
Choose which site to search.
University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Logo University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
College of Medicine: Department of Biomedical Informatics
  • UAMS Health
  • Jobs
  • Giving
  • About Us
    • Employment
    • News
    • Links
    • Department Intranet
  • Faculty
    • Primary Faculty
    • Secondary Faculty
    • Adjunct Faculty
  • Staff
  • Education
    • Admission Information
    • Student Funding Opportunities
    • Graduate Programs
    • Current Course Offerings
    • DBMI FAQs
    • Research & Application Seminar
    • Recorded Sessions for CME Credit
  • INBRE
    • INBRE Bioinformatics Core Support Request Form
  • Research Labs
    • Publications
    • Arkansas Center for Genomic & Ecological Medicine (ArC-GEM)
    • Arkansas Clinical Data Repository (AR-CDR)
    • Biomedical Ontologies Arkansas (BOAR)
  • Clinical Informatics Fellowship
    • Fellowship Overview
    • Training Sites
    • Faculty
    • Current Fellows
    • Welcome to Little Rock!
  • Databases
  • Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
    • About DBMI-DEI
    • DBMI-DEI Committee Members
    • DBMI-DEI Resources
    • DBMI-DEI Committee Events
  1. University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
  2. College of Medicine
  3. Department of Biomedical Informatics
  4. News
  5. Assessing the utility of metabarcoding for diet analyses of the omnivorous wild pig (Sus scrofa)

Assessing the utility of metabarcoding for diet analyses of the omnivorous wild pig (Sus scrofa)

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ece3.3638/full

Ecology and Evolution, (2018), 8:185-196. DOI: 10.1002/ece3.3638

Michael S. Robeson II, Kamil Khanipov, George Golovko, Samantha M. Wisely, Michael D. White, Michael Bodenchuck, Timothy J. Smyser, Yuriy Fofanov, Noah Fierer, Antoinette J. Piaggio

Abstract

Wild pigs (Sus scrofa) are an invasive species descended from both domestic swine and Eurasian wild boar that was introduced to North America during the early 1500s. Wild pigs have since become the most abundant free-ranging exotic ungulate in the United States. Large and ever-increasing populations of wild pigs negatively impact agricul- ture, sport hunting, and native ecosystems with costs estimated to exceed $1.5 bil- lion/year within the United States. Wild pigs are recognized as generalist feeders, able to exploit a broad array of locally available food resources, yet their feeding behaviors remain poorly understood as partially digested material is often unidentifiable through traditional stomach content analyses. To overcome the limitation of stomach content analyses, we developed a DNA sequencing-based protocol to describe the plant and animal diet composition of wild pigs. Additionally, we developed and evaluated block- ing primers to reduce the amplification and sequencing of host DNA, thus providing greater returns of sequences from diet items. We demonstrate that the use of block- ing primers produces significantly more sequencing reads per sample from diet items, which increases the robustness of ascertaining animal diet composition with molecular tools. Further, we show that the overall plant and animal diet composition is signifi- cantly different between the three areas sampled, demonstrating this approach is suit- able for describing differences in diet composition among the locations.

 

KEYWORDS

blocking primer, CO1, diet, feral swine, metabarcoding, trnL

Posted by Chris Lesher on January 8, 2018

Filed Under: Department News, Publications Tagged With: blocking primer, CO1, diet, feral swine, metabarcoding, Michael S. Robeson, trnL

UAMS College of Medicine LogoUAMS College of MedicineUniversity of Arkansas for Medical Sciences
Mailing Address: 4301 West Markham Street, Little Rock, AR 72205
Phone: (501) 686-7000
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
  • LinkedIn
  • Pinterest
  • Disclaimer
  • Terms of Use
  • Privacy

© 2023 University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences