eDNA tells you an organism's genetic material was somewhere in the system at some point. Environmental RNA tells you an organism is alive, metabolically active, and here today. RNA begins degrading within minutes to hours of leaving a living cell, and that fragility is exactly what makes it informative: a positive eRNA signal cannot come from a long-dead cell or from water that drifted in last week.

It also means eRNA cannot be collected the way eDNA is. Valid eRNA sampling requires high-volume pumped filtration to concentrate enough viable transcript signal, and immediate on-site chemical preservation to lock the snapshot before it breaks down. That is what the Osprey platform, supplied by our genomics partner, is built to do.

Sold in sets of three. Three sampling locations is the minimum order, for the same reason it is on the eDNA Survey — one point is not a picture of a lake.

You keep the raw sequence files, archived and reprocessable as reference libraries improve.

Note on methodology: eRNA analysis is not an EPA-approved method. It is a research-grade ecological tool, and results are not suitable for regulatory or compliance use.