To me technology enables the science
edna is environmental dna and so what it really is is a catch-all term for
all of the cellular material that organisms shed into their environment
rather than having to go sample every plant or animal directly what we can do is capture
an environmental sample and extract dna directly out of that environmental sample
these bottles descend down open and the water sample is then captured at specific depth
when the water comes up on board we will filter it and capture any of the dna in the water
sample on a filter we will then preserve that filter and it will get sent off to a lab where
it will be sequenced and we will figure out what kind of organisms were in the environment
at the time we collected those samples one of the nice things about it is it is found
throughout the ocean so we can collect it from the surface all the way down to the handle zones
one of the things we can use environmental dna for is things like rov surveys where when you're
doing that kind of visual survey you're limited to the field of view of the camera
oh you're seeing those we're more scared oh if you look at v2 right now the vehicle
doesn't turn to get that animal on camera then we will have no way of knowing that it was there
but because it's shedding cellular material into its environment if we take a water
sample right there that water sample will contain that material and it allows us
to detect that animal and know that it was there even though we didn't see it
one of the problems with doing things like deep sea coral surveys
is a lot of deep sea corals are very difficult to separate and identify visually we can
have two or three different species that unless you look at them under a microscope
you can't tell that they're different species and so when you're doing something like an
rov survey and you just have that picture we can't tell if it's species a b or c but if we take that
water sample we can compare it to our genetic reference library and tell which species we have
it's also been really important for detecting rare species because you can detect things at
high sensitivity things that you have trouble finding in a net or finding in a survey because
they're so rare it's excellent at doing that kind of detection so i guess one of the ways we would
be able to identify this is to count its tentacles but uh looks like that's pretty impossible in this
position that it's in right now the water column is the largest environment on earth and it is the
therefore the largest unexplored environment on earth and edna is going to allow us to explore
the water column more so than we have ever been able to do before in NOAA Ocean Exploration
it's become another really important tool kind of in the biological survey
toolbox this is going to be a revolutionary technique for
getting a baseline understanding of unexplored areas of the deep sea