New EPA grant will help develop early detection technology for high-risk invasive species
• Date: October 02, 2012
The University of Notre Dame has received a $599,931 Environmental Protection Agency grant under the Great Lakes Restoration Initiative to develop technologies for the early detection of invasive species using environmental DNA.
Environmental DNA refers to all types of tissue samples collected by filtering water from aquatic environments, such as sloughed cells, microscopic organisms or extracellular DNA from degraded tissues. This process, in combination with species-specific molecular genetic tools, has been successfully used to detect Asian carp.