Meeting Abstract
Being able to quickly and accurately identify plant species in a particular geographic region based on environmental pollen samples would be useful for a wide variety of fields including biogeography, ecology, paleontology, and forensics. Currently, microscopy is the most common technique used to identify pollen in environmental samples, but microscopy is a time-consuming task and requires extensive training. The purpose of this research project is to assess the usefulness of high throughput next generation DNA sequencing and metabarcoding for pollen identification and forensic geolocation. We extracted DNA from environmental soil samples and performed DNA metabarcoding using four different primers, two nuclear barcoding primers, ITS and ITSi, and two chloroplast barcoding primers rbcL and matK. This allowed us to evaluate the utility of the different primers for the identification of local plant species from environmental samples. Additionally, we wanted to know how informative metabarcoding sequence data would be for forensic geolocation. To do this, we compiled a list of “informative” plant species for the state of Georgia using the publicly available USDA PLANTS list. Informative plants were plants that were either identified as being found only in Georgia or only in the southeast United States. We were then able to compare the plants identified from the soil sample metabarcode sequencing to the list of informative plants generated from the USDA PLANTS list. By determining which primers are the most efficient at identifying plants in a mixed environmental sample, we can begin to more broadly apply DNA metabarcoding for pollen identification.
