Finding. A custom mitochondrial COI bait set turns creek water into a cross-phylum invertebrate list. Capture beats shotgun by about 1,760-fold and yields ~400 bp Folmer contigs. On Boulder Creek, roughly 450 genera from 8 phyla show up, about 56 genera a site, with a richness curve that matches old kick-net bioassessment: up through the canyon, down below the city. The mitochondrion is a barcode, and the barcode finally has a capture workflow that looks practical.
Why this paper matters
eDNA has struggled to replace conventional macroinvertebrate assays because diversity and resolution were wrong. Targeted COI hybridization is the authors’ answer. A mitochondrial desk files it as applied mtDNA, then gets out of the way of the ecologists.
What they actually measured
18 sites, capture versus shotgun, contig length, genus counts, comparison to conventional assemblages.
How to read the score
High fifties. Score 57.
What to do with it
If you run freshwater bioassessment, look at the bait panel and the 1,760-fold number. If you wanted organelle biology, this is not it. The directional implication is that COI capture can recover the taxa agencies already use, from water.