Introducing a Course Based Undergraduate Research (CURE) Special Topics environmental DNA (eDNA) Course: with a Report on the Detection of Rare Mussels from the Little Tennessee River of North Carolina.

Johnson C. Smith University (JCSU) is Charlotte's only Historically Black College or University (HBCU) and the number one ranked private HBCU in North Carolina. Over the past several years, our environmental and sustainability programming has incorporated active science education research aimed to increase the participation of African Americans (AAs) in sustainability and environmental sciences, and to improve stakeholder engagement in the environmental sector. Over the past three years, we hosted summer immersion programs for undergraduate students that included travel across multiple physiographic provinces. During the fall academic semester a collection of water samples were later used for analysis in a special topics eDNA course (BIO 491). In this course students are introduced to a mix of textbook material and engage in projects using real-world eDNA samples. Students learn laboratory skills through the use of qPCR analysis and also have the opportunity to analyze metabarcoding data contextualized to address relevant biodiversity concerns. Herein, we report on a metabarcoding dataset representing eDNA samples collected from five locations of the Little Tennessee River, each sampled in duplicate (n=10). Sampling sites were guided by the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences collections database accessed online. Using a cytochrome c oxidase (COI) metabarcode, 30 unique sequences were recovered representing a total of four species each from different genera. The samples averaged a 99.2% match with BLAST sequences from GenBank and none were less than a 97.4% match. The Tennessee Clubshell, Pleurobema oviforme, was detected from two samples from two different locations. The Rainbow, Villosa iris, was detected from seven samples from five different locations. This experiential learning activity and our findings will be discussed in context to broader applications for addressing modern environmental threats. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]