During the dark winter months, Markus has been sorting our benthic samples. The deeper we go in the lake, the fewer orders we find, from the left to the right in the figure. Also the abundance of organisms was lower in the samples collected deeper.
Diptera were abundant both in the shallow lake benthos and in the river benthos. River sample on the left, lake sample on the right in this figure. Chironomidae were the most abundant Diptera both in the lake and in the river benthos.
After we extracted the total DNA from the samples, we amplified the barcode section of CO1 gene using different primer sets. We carried out this work in the Hajibabaei lab at the Centre for Biodiversity Genomics, Canada. The amplifications were successful as seen in this figure where we have visualized the amplicons on agarose gel.
The amplicons were sequenced using Illumina Miseq system in the Hajibabaei lab. The result looks like this on the computer screen. Now we need to collect the good quality sequences, identify them and see whether we can find answers to our questions!
Markus