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On one hand, it encouragingly shows that the detection method is sensitive, Barnes said. The presence of human DNA in nearly every sample from the study is "a major hurdle," Barnes said. However, given that humans care for the mole rats, it made sense in retrospect, Clare said.
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The finding of human DNA within the animal enclosure at first surprised the researchers, Clare told Live Science.
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To identify the species the DNA came from, the researchers compared the sequences to reference sequences in a database. The researchers then extracted DNA from the filters and sequenced it. To see if animal eDNA from these sources could be collected, Clare and her colleagues vacuumed air from an enclosure of naked mole rats and from the room housing the enclosures through filters similar to the HEPA filters commonly found in heating and ventilation systems. "We had no idea if this would work," Clare told Live Science.īut while animals don't shoot pollen spores into the air, they do shed DNA in the forms of saliva and dead skin cells, for example. Animals, on the other hand, don't do that. Prior to this study, some researchers had collected plant DNA from the air, but most of those experiments involved plants that were "expected to intentionally release plumes of DNA into the air in the form of pollen and dispersing seeds," Barnes said. The species might be endangered or an invasive species new to an environment, he said. We do that with eDNA except for instead of looking for criminals, we're looking for a rare or elusive species," Barnes said. "The analogy that I use is like the detective at the crime scene, finding a cigarette butt and swabbing it for DNA to place the criminal at the crime scene. In the last decade, the collection and analysis of eDNA to study and manage plant and animal populations has taken off, Barnes said.
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"The demonstration that the DNA from relatively large animals can also be detected in air samples dramatically expands the potential for airborne eDNA analysis," said Matthew Barnes, an ecologist at Texas Tech University, in Lubbock, who was not involved in the new study.
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