Student 10-Minute Presentation
Systematics, Evolution, and Biodiversity
Student
Student Competition
Christian Louis Weinrich
University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
Robin Bagley
Assistant Professor
The Ohio State University
Lima, Ohio
Andrew A. Forbes
University of Iowa
Iowa City, Iowa
Despite a growing appreciation of the functional role that host-associated organisms play in the biology of their host, microbiome studies have ostensibly ignored eukaryotic associates. This is despite well-known and biologically significant interactions between hosts and eukaryotic symbionts. However, applying a targeted metagenomic approach to the study of the eukaryotic community living on a eukaryotic host has a major methodological impediment: host templates dominate PCR reactions with universal primers, competitively excluding templates belonging to non-host eukaryotes from amplification. One solution to this problem is the use of PCR ‘blockers’. Blockers are host-specific DNA oligos with modified 3’ ends that prevent extension by Taq polymerase. When used with universal primers, blockers thereby interfere with amplification of host DNA while allowing amplification of non-host DNA to proceed unaffected. I will discuss preliminary work to design a series of order-specific 18S blockers to target the five most species orders of insects and use blockers to survey the complete ‘eukaryomes’ of a taxonomically diverse array of insects.