Promising protocols for parasites: Metatranscriptomics improves detection of hyperdiverse but low abundance communities

Genomic technologies continue to shed light on important ecological and evolutionary questions. Nonetheless, these new tools are applied disproportionately in a small fraction of global biodiversity, partly because of technical challenges to studying highly diverse taxa that occur in low abundances in an environment (e.g., marine and microbial communities). As a result, our understanding of ecological and evolutionary processes lags in many taxa. In a From the Cover manuscript in this issue of Molecular Ecology Resources , Galen, Borner, Williamson, Witt, and Perkins (2020) present a novel approach for characterizing diversity that combines metatranscriptomics with rigorous bioinformatic processing to dramatically improve detection and identification of diverse, low‐abundance avian blood parasites. Their approach is an exciting application of available tools that increases our potential for a deeper understanding of diversity in other communities of low‐abundance, highly diverse taxa.