Advancing measurements of ocean biodiversity and ecosystem health through silicon nanophotonics for scalable multi-omic detection

The accelerating loss of biodiversity threatens ecosystems, food security, and human health. Marine biodiversity monitoring, essential for conservation efforts like those throughout the Palau National Marine Sanctuary, faces high costs and logistical challenges. Measurements of environmental DNA (eDNA)—genetic material released from organisms into the environment—can enable broad suites of biological diversity to be detected and provide information about species abundance and distributions. Current methods remain largely limited by intermittent sampling due to the human effort and costs required, however. To address this gap, we are developing a novel nanophotonic platform that could enable real-time detection of eDNA and metabolites. We propose to scale the number of molecular targets our platform can detect to enable monitoring of hundreds of targets simultaneously in an integrated microfluidic system that will be calibrated to gold-standard eDNA sampling techniques. Together, this platform could improve the frequency and accuracy of biodiversity assessments that may help promote sustainable conservation and management practices.