Cooperative Fish and Wildlife Research Units Program: Wisconsin Fishery
Education, Research and Technical Assistance for Managing Our Natural Resources

The goal of this study is to initiate the development of eDNA techniques for detection of presence/absence of the endangered unionid mussels: purple cat’s paw pearlymussel Epioblasma obliquata obliquata and snuffbox Epioblasma triquetra. Our specific objectives are to: 1) develop a set of species-specific PCR and qPCR markers for the two species and other extant species in Epioblasma (n = 11 total extant species per Musselp Database; http://mussel-project. uwsp.edu); 2) determine the critical threshold detection limit of qPCR for the developed markers using known amounts of DNA; and 3) determine the realized detection probabilities by testing water samples collected from known areas where the two target species occur and areas where they are not thought to occur using the developed qPCR molecular markers.