Growing up I had a myriad of interests in the scientific world. My first love was forensic science and I spent a few years of undergrad shadowing coroners and crime scene techs in California. I moved back home to Colorado and decided I found nature more appealing and completed my undergrad thesis studying invasive pathogenic fungus in migratory bats at Fort Lewis College. I joined the Dearing lab in 2016 and my PhD work focuses on the gut microbiome of woodrats and how it allows them to eat toxic plants, such as creosote. Outside the lab I enjoy gaming, gardening, and watching horror b-movies.
All animals eat, but quantifying what is eaten is still quite challenging. Advances in sequencing technology have led to increased use of DNA based diet analysis such as metabarcoding. This technique has risen in popularity for quantifying relative abundances of dietary items, however its accuracy has not been fully examined. Here we determined the accuracy of metabarcoding in quantifying dietary components using experimental feeding trials with desert woodrats. To do this, we prepared experimental diets using chow, creosote bush in variable amounts, and a constant juniper. We found that you could detect dietary components that make up as low as 1% of the diet and can distinguish between components that make up a majority or minority of the diet. However, we could not get an accurate measurement of dietary components in larger quantities and the use of relative abundances skewed all components of the diet. Collectively, our results suggest that DNA metabarcoding can provide indicators of the quantity of diet item, the use of relative abundances should be interpreted with caution.