A pilot study of fish diversity in Hong Kong waters using environmental DNA metabarcoding

Environmental DNA (eDNA) metabarcoding has been considered as a cost-effective and non-destructive approach for marine ecosystem monitoring, but its application in Hong Kong has been hindered by several problems: no streamlined DNA extraction for samples collected along a gradient of water quality, no assessment of the effectiveness of DNA primers for PCR amplification of gene loci for local fish, no reference barcoding database for local fish, and no streamlined bioinformatic pipeline for local species identification. To address some of these issues, this project aims to streamline a method for effective eDNA extraction, evaluate primers for PCR amplification, and develop a local DNA database and a user-friendly bioinformatic pipeline for identifying marine fish in local waters.