Understanding the risks of biological invasion posed by ballast water—whether in the context of compliance testing, routine monitoring, or basic research—is fundamentally an exercise in biodiversity assessment, and as such should take advantage of the best tools available for tackling that problem. The past several decades have seen growing application of genetic methods for the study of biodiversity, driven in large part by dramatic technological advances in nucleic acids analysis. Monitoring approaches based on such methods have the potential to increase dramatically sampling throughput for biodiversity assessments, and to improve on the sensitivity, specificity, and taxonomic accuracy of traditional approaches. The application of targeted detection tools (largely focused on PCR but increasingly incorporating novel probe-based methodologies) has led to a paradigm shift in rare species monitoring, and such tools have already been applied for early detection in the context of ballast water surveillance. Rapid improvements in community profiling approaches based on high throughput sequencing (HTS) could similarly impact broader efforts to catalogue biodiversity present in ballast tanks, and could provide novel opportunities to better understand the risks of biotic exchange posed by ballast water transport—and the effectiveness of attempts to mitigate those risks. These various approaches still face considerable challenges to effective implementation, depending on particular management or research needs. Compliance testing, for instance, remains dependent on accurate quantification of viable target organisms; while tools based on RNA detection show promise in this context, the demands of such testing require considerable additional investment in methods development. In general surveillance and research contexts, both targeted and community-based approaches are still limited by various factors: quantification remains a challenge (especially for taxa in larger size classes), gaps in nucleic acids reference databases are still considerable, uncertainties in taxonomic assignment methods persist, and many applications have not yet matured sufficiently to offer standardized methods capable of meeting rigorous quality assurance standards. Nevertheless, the potential value of these tools, their growing utilization in biodiversity monitoring, and the rapid methodological advances over the past decade all suggest that they should be seriously considered for inclusion in the ballast water surveillance toolkit.

中文翻译：

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用于压载水监测、监测和研究的基于核酸的工具

了解压载水造成的生物入侵风险——无论是在合规性测试、常规监测还是基础研究的背景下——从根本上来说是生物多样性评估的一项工作，因此应该利用现有的最佳工具来解决该问题。过去几十年来，遗传方法在生物多样性研究中的应用越来越多，这在很大程度上是由核酸分析技术的巨大进步推动的。基于此类方法的监测方法有可能显着提高生物多样性评估的采样通量，并提高传统方法的敏感性、特异性和分类准确性。靶向检测工具（主要集中于 PCR，但越来越多地纳入基于探针的新颖方法）的应用导致了稀有物种监测的范式转变，并且此类工具已应用于压载水监测背景下的早期检测。基于高通量测序 (HTS) 的群落分析方法的快速改进同样可以影响对压载舱中存在的生物多样性进行编目的更广泛努力，并可以提供新的机会来更好地了解压载水运输造成的生物交换风险以及压载水运输的有效性。尝试减轻这些风险。根据特定的管理或研究需求，这些不同的方法在有效实施方面仍然面临相当大的挑战。例如，合规性测试仍然依赖于对活目标生物体的准确量化；虽然基于 RNA 检测的工具在这方面显示出前景，但此类测试的需求需要在方法开发方面进行大量额外投资。在一般监测和研究背景下，有针对性的和基于社区的方法仍然受到各种因素的限制：量化仍然是一个挑战（特别是对于较大类别的分类单元），核酸参考数据库的差距仍然很大，分类分配方法的不确定性持续存在，并且许多应用程序尚未足够成熟，无法提供能够满足严格的质量保证标准的标准化方法。然而，这些工具的潜在价值、它们在生物多样性监测中的日益增长的利用以及过去十年方法学的快速进步都表明，应认真考虑将它们纳入压载水监测工具包中。