Karlijn Doorenspleet is a Ph.D. student at the Marine Animal Ecology chair group at Wageningen University, Netherlands. She studied Marine Biology at the University of Groningen, followed by Molecular Ecology at Wageningen University. Shortly after her studies, she joined Reindert Nijland and colleagues to share her enthusiasm for marine life and to further develop nanopore sequencing techniques to better study North Sea biodiversity.

The North Sea ecosystem is degraded. To improve ecological quality, accurate and intensive monitoring of the North Sea ecosystem is vital, as this will inform management decisions. DNA-based techniques can be a powerful tool to aid biomonitoring practices, and are currently in rapid development. We discuss technological developments, including the possibility to obtain accurate long-read sequences using fish eDNA metabarcoding with a new molecular marker targeting a 2 Kb region covering the 12s and 16s genes. Whole mitochondrial genome sequencing will be the next step to further increase identification accuracy and resolution.

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