Application of environmental RNA technology in aquatic biological monitoring

Background & Aims: Biological monitoring is a core component of biodiversity conservation, and an important tool for assessing the progress of conservation efforts.Traditional aquatic monitoring methods are often based on specimen collection and morphological identification, which are time-consuming and ineffective practices.Additionally, these methods are unable to conduct the type of large-scale, continuous ecological surveys that are required for many conservation initiatives.There is therefore an urgent need to find a new approach to monitoring to meet today's growing biodiversity surveillance needs.Progresses & Challenges: As molecular biology tools have improved, environmental RNA technology has been introduced into the field of aquatic biomonitoring and applied to species monitoring, biodiversity assessment, and pathogen detection, showing significant potential to meet conservation needs.However, the development of environmental RNA technology is still at the proof-of-concept stage, and there are many technical drawbacks, including limited understanding of environmental RNA ecological processes, the inconsistent application of the technology and,•综述•