Between January and February 2026, Corymbia Eco Sciences conducted the first large-scale eDNA metagenomic survey of the Yarra River and associated Victorian waterways. Water samples from 12 geographically diverse sites — spanning Warrandyte in the upper-middle reaches to the estuarine mouth at Spotswood — were sequenced using Oxford Nanopore long-read technology and processed through our Corymbia.AI bioinformatics platform.

The results: 7,148 unique taxa and 5,226 species-level identifications across bacteria, fungi, archaea, viruses, and other eukaryotes, along with 150 unique pathogenic species spanning organisms harmful to humans, animals, fish, and plants. To put this in perspective, a conventional water quality test at these sites would typically screen for fewer than 10 indicator organisms...

Most eDNA monitoring in Australia focuses on targeted detection — confirming the presence or absence of a single species from an environmental sample. That's valuable, but it's a fraction of the information contained in that sample. Corymbia Eco Sciences takes a fundamentally different approach: full metagenomic profiling using Oxford Nanopore next generation sequencing and our AI-powered bioinformatics platform, Corymbia.AI, to extract the complete biological picture from every sample we process.

From a single water collection, our pipeline simultaneously resolves bacterial, fungal, archaeal, and viral communities alongside macro-organism eDNA — delivering taxonomic identification across all kingdoms, pathogen detection at species level, biosecurity screening, and ecological community characterisation in one integrated analysis...