ANGFA Northern Australia

24/08/2026

What a lucky video! I took a close to hatching Pseudomugal halophilus egg, and placed it on a slice plate under the microscope. It hatched out while videoing it.

19/08/2026

Send a message to learn more

13/08/2026

To Book, either go to www.angfa.org.au and navigate to the Convention 2026 page, or cut and paste this link into your search engine: https://www.angfa.org.au/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=307&Itemid=303

Note the cut-off date for ordering your Convention Shirt is 28th August, so don't forget to order your shirt on the website.

09/08/2026

Not in the best colours. Tank temps still a bit to cold. Olive River trifasciata. Much more blue in the body, and red in the fins.

04/08/2026

30/07/2026

Very interesting workshop in Townsville today.

24/07/2026

21/07/2026

With scoops made from milk bottles, volunteers have been working tirelessly to save the red-fin blue-eye, found nowhere else in the world, from extinction.

06/07/2026

24/06/2026

📑 NEW STUDY: Power et al. tested a new genetic method for identifying individual fish, which could dramatically expand the scope of ecological studies using environmental DNA.

🤔 The issue

Environmental DNA (eDNA) analysis has transformed biodiversity monitoring by enabling rapid, non-invasive species detection by testing for DNA in samples from the environment, such as water.

eDNA is derived from multiple species, cell types, and individuals. The non-cellular fraction of eDNA may contain a mixture of genotypes from multiple individuals.

Standard eDNA sampling and analysis does not allow recovery of individual multi-locus genotypes from this mixture. Solving this requires two innovations:

(1) separating eDNA particles (emCells) belonging to individual organisms from a mixture;

(2) generating multilocus genotypes from individual emCells.

👩🏽‍🔬 What did the researchers do?

Having investigated the partitioning of individual emCells in previous research, the team here tested whether multi-locus nuclear single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) genotypes can be reliably generated from lab-generated and isolated single fish cells as a model for wild emCells.

Their workflow – “emCell-Seq” – combines fluorescence-activated cell sorting (FACS) to isolate environmental metazoan cells (emCells) with multiplex PCR targeting discriminatory nuclear SNPs.

Individual zebrafish (Danio rerio) cells were created from tissue and pooled into mock emCells samples of known single and mixed source. Pooled samples were sorted by FACS, which isolated individual cells that were genotyped with a panel of 35 SNPs. SNP genotypes from emCells were compared to known genotypes to assess assignment accuracy.

💡 What did they find?

For emCells in an artificial pool from multiple individuals, 91% were correctly assigned. No mixed genotypes were obtained.

👍 What does it all mean?

This study provides the first evidence that individual-level nuclear genotypes can be obtained from isolated fish emCells. Extending these findings to field-collected emCells will significantly expand the scope of ecological analyses enabled by eDNA.