CONCLUSION
DNA metabarcoding is a
promising and cost-efficient tool for monitoring benthic communities in
the marine environment. In view of the large taxonomic and phylogenetic
diversity in marine communities (Appeltans et al., 2012; Mora,
Tittensor, Adl, Simpson, & Worm, 2011) and differences in benthic
communities between geographic realms, optimisation of the protocol for
the taxonomic group and geographic region at hand are necessary. By
aiming for the detection of the highest number of known morphological
species in a given area, a link with long time series of monitoring data
based on morpho-taxonomy can be made. Our results demonstrate the impact
of primer choice and DNA source when using the mitochondrial COI gene to
assess macrobenthic species diversity. We show that the probability of
detecting macrobenthos species is linked to morphological traits and
this detection is most robust and most comparable with morphological
results when using the Leray primer set and bulkDNA as template for DNA
metabarcoding.