Fontaine et al. show metabarcoding in combination with multivariate statistics and machine learning allows to identify bacterial bioindicators for existing biological status classification systems. Spatio-temporal links spanning the microbial communities along the Danube river allow accurate prediction of downstream biological status from upstream information.
The article can be read at the journal website.
Fontaine, L., Pin, L., Savio, D., Friberg, N., Kirschner, A.K.T., Farnleitner, A.H., Eiler, A., 2023. Bacterial bioindicators enable biological status classification along the continental Danube river. Commun Biol 6, 862. https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-023-05237-8