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Wildlife surveys using 'DNA vacuums'! 
With just 3 days of ‘vacuuming’ airborne eDNA in a Danish forest, we detected 64 animals - domestic, exotic pets and.. over 50 species of wild birds, mammals and amphibians! This was our first exploration of airborne eDNA in a natural setting and we were especially surprised by the high number of bird taxa detected.
You can find the paper here: https://doi.org/10.1111/1755-0998.13840
Thank you to all coauthors and to VILLUM FONDEN for the support.
@biodiversity Wow. This is incredible! What is airborne eDNA typically composed of? I'm guessing skin cells, hair, fecal matter?
@gregory_manni We still don't know, but we think it is a mix of all of that. It may also be free-floating DNA attached to other airborne particles.
@biodiversity could it be used for gathering dna to link someone to a crime scene? Or at least prove a human was there?
@biodiversity Very cool. This has such an amazing amount of potential for biodiversity monitoring.
@biodiversity wow!! that's fascinating!! that's a much less invasive way of understand biodiversity?
I didn't know what eDNA was until today. Will just quote for anyone that wonders :)
»Environmental DNA or eDNA is DNA that is collected from a variety of environmental samples such as soil, seawater, snow or air, rather than directly sampled from an individual organism.« https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_DNA
@biodiversity is there any potential of contamination of data by, for example migratory birds carrying things contaminated with dna from places nowhere near the area you are monitoring?
@TT_392 Sure, we saw this in our previous work at the Zoo in Copenhagen where we think people were carrying DNA from zoo animals. However, this foreign DNA carried by migratory birds would be degraded and the probability of detecting it would be lower than detecting "in site/fresh" DNA. We still need to optimise this method, so there are still many questions left to explore.
When you have to use airborne DNA testing to measure extinction level events instead of visual sightings...
The oil industry has a lot to answer for regarding climate change.
@biodiversity Amazing work! Do you use 16s database to profile the organisms? What is your pipeline in a few words?
@hierophant_nihilant We used NCBI to taxonomically identify the sequences. For this we just compare the sequences to what is found in that database.
wow... that's cool
@biodiversity That is super cool!
@biodiversity also curious (but too tired to dig through the article) any unknown sequence / sequence not mapping to anything within NCBI NR?
@dryak Very few sequences, but these can be errors.
@biodiversity
Very cool. Imagine what an eDNA vacuum might find in @stilgherrian’s backyard?
@melissamadsen @biodiversity Given that the backyard is a eucalypt forest — and wtf just as I was typing this a superb lyrebird just strolled past my window! Three metres away.
Also, more than 50 species of birds have been sighted at Bunjaree.
@biodiversity very cool science :)