Promising protocols for parasites: Metatranscriptomics improves detection of hyperdiverse but low abundance communities.

Abstract

Genomic technologies continue to shed light on important ecological and evolutionary questions. Nonetheless, these new tools are applied disproportionately in a small fraction of global biodiversity, partly because of technical challenges to studying highly diverse taxa that occur in low abundances in an environment (e.g., marine and microbial communities). As a result, our understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes lags in many taxa. In a From the Cover manuscript in this issue of Molecular Ecology Resources, Galen, Borner, Williamson, Witt, and Perkins (2020) present a novel approach for characterizing diversity that combines metatranscriptomics with rigorous bioinformatic processing to dramatically improve detection and identification of diverse, low-abundance avian blood parasites. Their approach is an exciting application of available tools that increases our potential for a deeper understanding of diversity in other communities of low-abundance, highly diverse taxa.