Metabarcoding
Metabarcoding is the barcoding of DNA/RNA (or eDNA/eRNA) in a manner that allows for the simultaneous identification of many taxa within the same sample. The main difference between barcoding and metabarcoding is that metabarcoding does not focus on one specific organism, but instead aims to determine species composition within a sample.
| Part of a series on |
| DNA barcoding |
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| By taxa |
| Other |
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A barcode consists of a short variable gene region (for example, see different markers/barcodes) which is useful for taxonomic assignment flanked by highly conserved gene regions which can be used for primer design. This idea of general barcoding originated in 2003 from researchers at the University of Guelph.
The metabarcoding procedure, like general barcoding, proceeds in order through stages of DNA extraction, PCR amplification, sequencing and data analysis. Different genes are used depending if the aim is to barcode single species or metabarcoding several species. In the latter case, a more universal gene is used. Metabarcoding does not use single species DNA/RNA as a starting point, but DNA/RNA from several different organisms derived from one environmental or bulk sample.