The Environment Agency has published a paper setting out its position on accepting DNA-based methods for environmental monitoring and decision-making in the absence of a regulated framework to validate the methods. “The adoption of DNA-based methods in regulations will give a paradigm shift to ecological assessment. For this DNA-based paradigm to emerge and to enable us to make appropriately informed regulatory and management decisions, we need to be confident that the information generated is reliable, highly specific and can accurately indicate the presence of the target organism(s) in the test water body”, the statement says.

Two approaches are being focused on:

• one targets DNA extracted directly from the organisms themselves
• the other uses environmental DNA (eDNA) which is released from an organism via faeces, urine, slime, skin and so on into environmental samples such as water, soil and sediments.

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