Elsevier

Marine Genomics

Volume 24, Part 1, December 2015, Pages 11-20
Marine Genomics

Review
Metagenetic tools for the census of marine meiofaunal biodiversity: An overview

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.margen.2015.04.010Get rights and content
Under a Creative Commons license
open access

Abstract

Marine organisms belonging to meiofauna (size range: 20–500 μm) are amongst the most abundant and highly diversified metazoans on Earth including 22 over 35 known animal Phyla and accounting for more than 2/3 of the abundance of metazoan organisms. In any marine system, meiofauna play a key role in the functioning of the food webs and sustain important ecological processes. Estimates of meiofaunal biodiversity have been so far almost exclusively based on morphological analyses, but the very small size of these organisms and, in some cases, the insufficient morphological distinctive features limit considerably the census of the biodiversity of this component. Molecular approaches recently applied also to small invertebrates (including meiofauna) can offer a new momentum for the census of meiofaunal biodiversity. Here, we provide an overview on the application of metagenetic approaches based on the use of next generation sequencing platforms to study meiofaunal biodiversity, with a special focus on marine nematodes. Our overview shows that, although such approaches can represent a useful tool for the census of meiofaunal biodiversity, there are still different shortcomings and pitfalls that prevent their extensive use without the support of the classical taxonomic identification. Future investigations are needed to address these problems and to provide a good match between the contrasting findings emerging from classical taxonomic and molecular/bioinformatic tools.

Keywords

Meiofauna
Biodiversity
Metagenetic
High-throughput sequencing
18S rRNA gene

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