Behind the paper: eDNA has great potential as a wildlife survey tool, but should be used properly

As many people know, two of my favourite topics are bandicoots and environmental DNA (eDNA). So I’m very excited about the online debut of my latest paper “A framework for developing and validating taxon-specific primers for specimen identification from environmental DNA” at Molecular Ecology Resources, which includes both bandicoots and eDNA. eDNA analysis is the analysis of DNA…

Bison, bioinformatics and (meta)barcoding

This is my first post here since April. I’ve spent much of the last three months travelling, holidaying, workshopping and attending two conferences. I had a wonderful time in Adelaide at the Genetics Society of AustralAsia’s 2015 conference and learned about some fascinating new science at the Boden Reseach Conference on Comparative Animal Genomics. But…

Behind the paper: evaluating the sensitivity and specificity of DNA tests for wildlife

If you open a few recent journals with a focus on conservation or ecology, the chances are that you won’t be too far away from a paper that uses environmental DNA (eDNA). In fact, Biological Conservation currently has a special issue on environmental DNA as a tool for conservation, which I’ve added to my reading…