bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.27.921304; this version posted January 28, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY 4.0 International license. 1 A novel metabarcoding strategy for studying nematode 2 communities 3 4 Md. Maniruzzaman Sikder1, 2, Mette Vestergård1, Rumakanta Sapkota3, Tina Kyndt4, 5 Mogens Nicolaisen1* 6 7 1Department of Agroecology, Aarhus University, Slagelse, Denmark 8 2Department of Botany, Jahangirnagar University, Savar, Dhaka, Bangladesh 9 3Department of Environmental Science, Aarhus University, Roskilde, Denmark 10 4Department of Biotechnology, Ghent University, Ghent, Belgium 11 12 13 *Corresponding author 14 Email:
[email protected] 15 16 Abstract 17 Nematodes are widely abundant soil metazoa and often referred to as indicators of soil health. 18 While recent advances in next-generation sequencing technologies have accelerated 19 research in microbial ecology, the ecology of nematodes remains poorly elucidated, partly due 20 to the lack of reliable and validated sequencing strategies. Objectives of the present study 21 were (i) to compare commonly used primer sets and to identify the most suitable primer set 22 for metabarcoding of nematodes; (ii) to establish and validate a high-throughput sequencing 23 strategy for nematodes using Illumina paired-end sequencing. In this study, we tested four 1 bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.27.921304; this version posted January 28, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity.