Who is eating what: diet assessment using next generation sequencing

The analysis of food webs and their dynamics facilitates understanding of the mechanistic processes behind community ecology and ecosystem functions. Having accurate techniques for determining dietary ranges and components is critical for this endeavour. While visual analyses and early molecular approaches are highly labour intensive and often lack resolution, recent DNA-based approaches potentially provide more accurate methods for dietary studies. A suite of approaches have been used based on the identification of consumed species by characterization of DNA present in gut or faecal samples. In one approach, a standardized DNA region (DNA barcode) is PCR amplified, amplicons are sequenced and then compared to…