A critical review on the application of environmental DNA (eDNA) metagenomics in monitoring and assessing biological communities post marine oil spills

Abstract

Oil spills pose a serious threat to marine communities, and there is an urgent need for an effective technique to monitor and assess the impacts on biological communities. While traditional methods with low sensitivity, being time-consuming and limited resolution are difficult to meet the application requirements, environmental DNA (eDNA) metagenomics provides an effective tool for comprehensive and long-term monitoring of biomes through non-destructive sampling, which can detect multiple trophic levels at the same time. Meanwhile, this technology provides significant advantages in diversity analysis, community composition and abundance change assessment, and functional gene annotation, enabling a more comprehensive evaluation of oil spills' impacts on marine communities. This review critically summarizes the workflow, including sample collection, DNA extraction, sequencing and data analysis, provides a systematic overview of the application of eDNA metagenomics in marine oil spills, and explores the latest advances in current technologies. Here, we also discuss the technical challenges and future development potential of the method, and emphasize the importance of process standardization, the construction of a global DNA reference database, and artificial intelligence-assisted analysis, which establish a robust theoretical foundation for the systematic application of eDNA metagenomics in marine oil spills monitoring, and new research perspectives on marine ecological pollution management and remediation assessment. Although the method still faces certain technical challenges, its unique advantages in pollution prevention and remediation make it expected to become a core tool for global marine pollution monitoring and assessment.