MiFish environmental DNA metabarcoding: A new biodiversity monitoring approach

Abstract

This paper briefly reviews current methodology and practices of the environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding approach using a universal PCR primer pair MiFish, which co-amplifies a short fragment of fish DNA (around 170 bp from the mitochondrial 12S rRNA gene) across a wide variety of taxa. This method has been applied to biodiversity monitoring using eDNA shed from fish and, coupled with next-generation sequencing technologies, allowed to perform massively parallel sequencing of several hundred eDNA samples simultaneously. Since the publication of its technical outline in 2015, this method has been widely used in various aquatic environments in and around the six continents, and MiFish primers have been demonstrably shown to outperform other competing primers. Additionally, I introduce the latest information on the government-led initiatives of biodiversity monitoring using MiFish eDNA metabarcoding.