A biochip for fish detection using eDNA

The morning stillness is broken by the soft hum of e-bikes cruising up an old logging road. One, two, three – a small army of Trout Unlimited volunteers rounds the corner. They are hunting for Dolly Varden, a rare species of fish found in the Nooksack River basin of northwestern Washington state. Although they have flyrods in tow, their primary tool of choice today is an environmental DNA (eDNA) sampling kit. This tool enables them to infer species presence from genetic traces in the water. The volunteers collect each sample by running stream water through a filter. Then, they send the filter paper to a lab and receive a yes/no result for each species of interest.

For over a decade, the National Genomics Center for Wildlife and Fish Conservation has partnered with Trout Unlimited and others to pull off basin-wide eDNA surveys. Today, though, the volunteers are particularly excited because they now have a new tool in their back pocket. The samples they are collecting won’t just be used to tell them about Dolly Varden – they will also be run on a new “biochip” that simultaneously looks for signals of ten more species. This new tool will provide high-quality data about the presence of a suite of the most ecologically and socially important fishes in the Pacific Northwest: bull trout, rainbow trout (steelhead), coastal cutthroat trout, brook trout, sockeye salmon, Chinook salmon, coho salmon, chum salmon, pink salmon, and Pacific lamprey.

The National Genomics Center built this biochip to fill an important gap: finding a way to analyze water samples for multiple species that is both cost-effective and accurate. The “gold standard” for eDNA analysis is quantitative PCR (qPCR), and although scientists can use this method to iteratively analyze a single water sample for multiple species, doing so is expensive. Some other methods are designed for multi-species analysis (e.g., metabarcoding), but these approaches typically result in lower accuracy than qPCR. The biochip technology uses HT-qPCR to produce results that are very similar to qPCR far more efficiently. How similar? Based on nearly 700 side-by-side analyses, the National Genomics Center found that concordance was >90% between the biochip and single-species qPCR – about the same as run-to-run variation with qPCR. The benefit is that each analysis uses less sample, fewer reagents, and takes less time; ultimately, it costs less than 40% of what the same data would require with single-species qPCR.

Months after the hum of e-bikes has died away, our Dolly Varden hunters finally find their quarry – along with the entire assemblage of salmonids and Pacific lamprey – mapped across the entire riverscape, while reading the National Genomics Center report from the comfort of their own living rooms. You can join them. Check out the paper and the research highlight for more information!