In an article published at Molecular Ecology Resources, the Haw Par team proposed how to use the number of sequences sequenced by high-throughput sequencing to reflect the animals' feeding preferences

Recently, Molecular Ecology Resources, an international authoritative academic journal in the field of molecular ecology, published the latest research results of the Beijing Normal University Tiger and Leopard team on how to use the sequence number of high-throughput sequencing to reflect the feeding preferences of animals

The feeding composition and preferences of animals are the basis of the material and energy cycle of ecosystems, and are also important background information for the protection of endangered animals

The study took the sika deer, an important large herbivores in the Siberian Tiger and Leopard National Park, as the experimental object, and the feeding experiment was carried out

Figures 1 a and c represent the correlation between the expected proportion of eating in the stool sample and the frequency of occurrence (FOO), sequence number, respectively;

Many factors can cause deviations between the number of sequences and the proportion of true eating, including tissue differences between food species (DNA content in tissues, copy number of barcoding genes, degree of primer matching, effects of differences in other histochemical compositions, etc.

Because MC1 has only one species during molecular experiments and there is no interspecies interaction, SCN-MC1, SCN ratio-MC1 reflects pure tissue differences

Fig.

In contrast, the SCN and SCN ratio values of each species obtained from MC2, MC3 and MC5, in the presence of species interaction, the difference in sequence number between species becomes significantly larger, which reflects that species interaction can enhance the tissue difference between species, and this enhancement is a double-edged sword

Figure 3 The relationship

Based on the results of this study, we recommend the following for future tissue bias correction:

(1) The mc1 simulation community can be used to assess the size of pure tissue differences between species, and then evaluate the possible effects of tissue correction using pure tissue differences;

(2) For most taxa, it is a better strategy

(3) During the experiment, especially in the early sample mixing, DNA extraction and PCR process, the random effect is large, so the sample size

The study was officially published in Molecular Ecology Resources (2022 impact factor 8.
678)
in molecular ecology resources, a top journal of the Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Zhu Wei, a doctoral candidate in ecology at Beijing Normal University, is the first author of the paper, and Associate Professor Wang Hongfang is the corresponding author
.
The research was supported
by the National Science and Technology Basic Resources Survey (2019FY101700) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32071494, 31770410).

Article link: https://onlinelibrary.
wiley.
com/doi/epdf/10.
1111/1755-0998.
13700?saml_referrer