HABSSED: Harmful Algal Bloom Surveillance by Sequencing of Environmental DNA

Harmful algal blooms (HABs) represent a significant problem for the Blue Economy, adversely affecting drinking water, commercial fisheries, water recreation, and tourism. Early detection of HABs is crucial in mitigating their effects. We propose to continue our development of HABSSED (Harmful Algal Bloom Surveillance by Sequencing of Environmental DNA) into the prototyping phase. The HABSSED pipeline, once completed, will be a novel, rapid, inexpensive surveillance technique for detecting HABs by leveraging abundance of microbial taxa in the environment, measured through eDNA sequencing. The pipeline will be simple enough to democratize the process, such that citizen scientists and labs with limited funding can benefit from it. For our Phase I work, we successfully demonstrated the feasibility of our approach, by sequencing water samples drawn from Lake Erie GLERLs, and showing differential abundance of Microcystis species between bloom-drawn and pre-bloom samples. Our Phase II plans are to develop a prototype pipeline that incorporates the processes developed in Phase I, but refines each step from sampling, through sequencing, analysis, and predictive modelling. When complete, we believe HABSSED will become an essential tool for any Blue Economy stakeholder in areas where HABs are a concern or likely to become a concern in the future.