Propylene glycol-based antifreeze is an effective preservative for DNA metabarcoding of benthic arthropods
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Preservation of DNA in bulk environmental samples is conventionally achieved using ethanol; however, transportation restrictions on ethanol, particularly from remote locations, are problematic, and ethanol requires a lengthy evaporation period to avoid polymerase chain reaction inhibition. We examined the efficacy of an easily accessible, non-toxic, propylene glycol-based antifreeze as an alternative to molecular-grade ethanol for preserving macroinvertebrate DNA from bulk-benthos DNA samples. We used 2 processing methods (no evaporation of preservative vs full evaporation) to test the differences in both cytochrome oxidase I (COI) exact sequence variants (ESVs) and COI taxonomic orders detected in both ethanol- and antifreeze-preserved samples. Our results suggest that antifreeze is a suitable alternative to ethanol for preservation of DNA in freshly collected samples (e.g., up to 3 d) because of the comparable ESV richness detected in antifreeze-preserved samples. We have demonstrated that by using antifreeze, it is possible to achieve sufficient taxonomic coverage and assess macroinvertebrate assemblages within bulk-benthos DNA samples. The application of this non-regulated preservative is particularly important for remote sampling (i.e., only air accessible) and sampling for community-based biomonitoring projects within Indigenous territories where alcohol is prohibited or not available.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it