EGU25-14191, updated on 15 Mar 2025
https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-14191
EGU General Assembly 2025
© Author(s) 2025. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Species-specific primer development for identifying the major jellyfish contributors to DNA in the sediments
Dhugal Lindsay1, Javier Montenegro2, Jennifer Questel3, Aino Hosia4, Joan-Josep Soto-Angel4, Luis Martell4, Alan Jamieson2, Russell Hopcroft3, and Allen Collins5,6
Dhugal Lindsay et al.
  • 1X-STAR, Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (Yokosuka, Japan), Japan (dhugal@jamstec.go.jp)
  • 2Minderoo-UWA Deep-Sea Research Centre, University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia (javier.montenegro@uwa.edu.au)
  • 3College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, USA (jmquestel@alaska.edu)
  • 4University Museum of Bergen, Bergen, Norway (Aino.Hosia@uib.no)
  • 5NOAA National Marine Fisheries Service, Washington DC, USA (Allen.Collins@noaa.gov)
  • 6Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington DC, USA (COLLINSA@si.edu)

Gelatinous zooplankton ("jellies") have been hypothesized to be the missing link in balancing the current carbon budget mismatch in the "biological carbon pump." During and just after jellyfish bloom events, large amounts of carbon are produced and exported from the euphotic zone via "jelly falls" of dead carcasses and excreted mucous. Due to the patchy nature of these processes, in addition to optical survey tools, a biochemical marker-type approach is needed to provide data integrated over time. Environmental DNA has been found to persist in sediments for time periods greater than one year. The V9 region of the 18S ribosomal DNA gene is one of the most common sequences used for eDNA surveys of whole communities but, currently, GenBank contains fewer than 25 of these sequences from marine jellyfish, with most of these sequences belonging to the Scyphozoan order Coronatae. We report here on our progress in greatly increasing this number, as well as identifying other genes and gene regions that could be exploited for eDNA studies of jellyfishes, particularly for the 16S and COI mitochondrial genes. 

How to cite: Lindsay, D., Montenegro, J., Questel, J., Hosia, A., Soto-Angel, J.-J., Martell, L., Jamieson, A., Hopcroft, R., and Collins, A.: Species-specific primer development for identifying the major jellyfish contributors to DNA in the sediments, EGU General Assembly 2025, Vienna, Austria, 27 Apr–2 May 2025, EGU25-14191, https://doi.org/10.5194/egusphere-egu25-14191, 2025.