Smart surveillance tools for early warning of biosecurity threats to the Australian grains industry

Effective field collection and testing of insect populations is critical to ensure Australia’s continued biosecurity and management of established pests. Detection and identification of insect species is no longer dependent on labour intensive morphological examination.  Metabarcoding is a DNA sequence based method that can identify multiple species present in a mixed population of insects.  This high throughput, scalable approach enables the identification of insects collected in insect traps located on-farm.    

Key Learnings

1. Automated sample processing using metabarcoding can provide presence/absence data of grains high priority pests.
2. Metabarcoding is a scalable diagnostics platform that is cost effective when compared to current surveillance data generation methods