Data from: Rapid species level identification of fish eggs by proteome fingerprinting using MALDI-TOF MS

Quantifying spawning biomass of commercially relevant fish species is
important to generate fishing quotas. This will mostly rely on the annual
or daily production of fish eggs. However, these have to be identified
precisely to species level to obtain a reliable estimate of offspring
production of the different species. Because morphological identification
can be very difficult, recent developments are heading towards application
of molecular tools. Methods such as COI barcoding have long handling times
and cause high costs for single specimen identifications. In order to test
MALDI-TOF MS, a rapid and cost-effective alternative for species
identification, we identified fish eggs using COI barcoding and used the
same specimens to set up a MALDI-TOF MS reference library. This library,
constructed from two different MALDI-TOF MS instruments, was then used to
identify unknown eggs from a different sampling occasion. By using a line
of evidence from hierarchical clustering and different supervised
identification approaches we obtained concordant species identifications
for 97.5% of the unknown fish eggs, proving MALDI-TOF MS a good tool for
rapid species level identification of fish eggs. At the same time we point
out the necessity of adjusting identification scores of supervised methods
for identification to optimize identification success.