Background

I love fishing and I can’t catch a fish at all sometimes. At that time, I’m wondering i can see inside of water.

And I made a robot lure with a camera, but it can detect fishes only close to the camera. And cameras can’t quantitatively estimate the number of fishes.

But environmental DNA(eDNA) have a lot of potentials. eDNA fingerprinting can reveal which species of fish were recently swimming there with fish’s skin, excreta and so on.

Projects

I will map fish distributions in Tokyo for environmental protection, especially for rockfish. Rockfish glows slowly and live at same place. They are getting decrease because of many anglers and landfills. The problem is that noone can’t see inside of water. That’s why people catch a lot of fishes, which results in overfishing. eDNA have a power to resolve this problem.

Procedure

At first, we need to take water from the sea, keep it cold as much as possible and bring back to a lab. Then, we filter the water with a glass filter. But it contains several stuff like sands, so we need to extract only DNA with some reagents. Finally we amplify DNA by PCR and visualize with an electrophoresis.

Results

under developing