In recent years, with the development of high-throughput sequencing technology and molecular biology technologies, environmental nucleic acid (eDNA, eRNA) has become an important way to evaluate ecological health. Although many reviews have focused on the application of eDNA/eRNA in biodiversity assessment, this paper attempts to explore how to apply new methods of analyzing eDNA/eRNA in assessing the health status of aquatic ecosystems. This review summarizes four main progress: high frequency automatic sampling and monitoring, application of unsupervised machine learning in predicting ecosystem conditions, population genetic analysis, non-invasive ecological toxicological monitoring. In the future, standard technical protocols for eDNA / eRNA will continue to be refined, a multidimensional database integrating genomic, transcriptomic and epigenetic information will be established, which can provide a non-invasive, quick, portable, information-rich way for checking if the water environment is healthy, and give the early warnings of pollution risk.
Hu et al. (Fri,) studied this question.