Diatom communities in marine protected areas in the coral reefs in Lombok, Indonesia, using aqueous and sedimentary environmental DNA (eDNA)

Abstract

Diatom has a specific response to particular ecological conditions. They live both planktonic and benthic, which is usually the diversity that has only been documented by microscopic. The information about the diversity of Diatoms is critical as a baseline study for biomonitoring. Thus, in this study, we applied environmental DNA through a next-generation sequencing method to analyze planktonic and benthic communities of Diatom in marine protected areas in Lombok Waters, Indonesia. The result shows that benthic Diatom has more richness than planktonic but lacks significance between spatial. In our study, we detected 25 species of Diatom in West and East Lombok. Diatom from sediment samples has more richness than water, with four species only found in the Water samples and 18 species in the sediment samples. Three species were found both in the water and sediment samples. The highest abundance in the Stramenopiles clades is Diatom. Relative abundance of diatom about 12% to 23.91% from total micro eukaryotic or about 85.71%tol 86.14% from total Stramenopiles clades for East Lombok and West Lombok, respectively. Limitations of the genetic reference database, especially for tropical causes, restricted the determination of genetically identified sequence types at both genus and species levels.