Freshwater Benthic Biodiversity Metabarcodes and Reference Database

A curated database of 822 genera of European freshwater benthic invertebrates developed for environmental DNA biomonitoring. It was created by researchers at the University of Milan, combining in vitro analysis of 1514 individuals from 578 taxonomic units with GenBank sequences. The dataset evaluates three genetic metabarcodes (18S rDNA, 16S rDNA, COI) for their performance in biodiversity monitoring.

Use Cases

• Compare the universality and resolution of different genetic metabarcodes (Euka02, Inse01, BF1_BR2-COI) for freshwater invertebrate detection.
• Build or augment reference databases for taxonomic assignment of eDNA sequences from freshwater benthic samples.
• Assess the performance of metabarcoding primers for monitoring key insect orders like Ephemeroptera, Plecoptera, and Trichoptera.
• Design multi-marker metabarcoding approaches to improve the accuracy of freshwater biodiversity assessments.

Strengths

• Database includes sequences representing 822 genera of benthic invertebrates.
• Primer performance was tested on 1514 individuals from 578 different taxonomic units.
• Analysis includes a formal comparison of three distinct genetic metabarcodes.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• Data may reflect geographic bias inherent to the focus on France and Europe.

Provenance

Source

University of Milan

Collection Method

Combined in vitro analyses on collected specimens with in silico data from GenBank.

Geography

Primarily France and Europe