eRNA-Min: Minimum Information Standard for Environmental RNA Reporting

Environmental RNA (eRNA) is increasingly recovered from water, soil, sediment, and air, and has been used not only for organism detection but also for inference on physiological state, stress responses, and exposure signatures. Compared with environmental DNA, eRNA measurements are more readily altered by pre-analytical variation (capture materials, time to stabilization, storage conditions, inhibitors, and contamination control) and by downstream analytical choices, while reporting has remained inconsistent across taxa and ecosystems. In this article, eRNA-Min is proposed as a minimum information standard for environmental RNA reporting, with the main aim of enabling accurate, reproducible, and comparable interpretation of eRNA findings from single species to complex communities. A concise checklist is provided spanning study context and exposure definition, sampling and preservation metadata, extraction and negative-control reporting, library preparation and sequencing descriptors, and bioinformatic/statistical provenance with explicit software and reference versioning. To reduce overstatement of putative biomarkers, a structured “biomarker claim card” is included to document context of use, confounders considered, evidence tier, and performance metrics aligned to the stated claim. Wider adoption of eRNA-Min is expected to strengthen cross-study synthesis, support independent validation, and improve translation of eRNA research into environmental biomonitoring.