Blanche D’Anastasi – PhD Candidate 1,2,3 Dr Vimoksalehi Lukoschek – Research Fellow 1

1. Using Next Generation Amplicon Sequencing to undertake a high resolution diet study in true sea snakes Blanche D’Anastasi – PhD Candidate1,2,3 Dr Vimoksalehi Lukoschek – Research Fellow1 Dr Lynne van Herwerden – Senior Lecturer2 Dr. Colin Simpfendorfer – Professor and Centre Director3,4 Dr. Jean-Paul Hobbs – Post Doctoral Fellow5 1Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Coral Reef Studies, JCU 2School of Marine and Tropical Biology, James Cook University 3School of Earth and Environmental Sciences, JCU 4Centre for Sustainable Tropical Fisheries and Aquaculture, James Cook University 5Oceans Institute, University of Western Australia Simon Allen

2. Extract DNA from intestinal content of at least 20 snakes per species Use PCR to amplify genes of prey items and tag gut contents of 25 snakes • NGAS – How it works Pool equal amount of amplicons from 25 snakes

3. A library of 7000 sequence reads per snake Use Bioinformatics platforms to match each read to a data bases • NGAS – How it works Send for Next Generation Sequencing on a Roche GS Junior 454 platform

4. NGAS – How it works No match – geographic information or assign higher taxonomic status Calculate % contribution of each prey item Murray et al., 2011