Fishing in the gene-pool: Implementing trawl-associated eDNA metaprobe for large scale monitoring of fish assemblages

Marine biodiversity monitoring in the Mediterranean’s increasingly threatened ecosystems is crucial for effective ecosystem conservation and management. Here, we leveraged the Mediterranean International Trawl Survey program (MEDITS) to implement eDNA sampling through the recently tested ‘metaprobe’ procedure and characterize fish assemblages in three separate areas off the Italian coasts: Northern Adriatic Sea (NoAS), Ligurian and Northern Tyrrhenian Sea (LNTS), and Sardinian Sea (SaS). By combining the information from two homologous mitochondrial 12S metabarcodes––i.e., Elas02 and Tele02 targeting elasmobranchs and teleosts, respectively––we identified 108 species, over 60% of which overlapped with those caught by the trawl net. We produced an accurate reconstruction of fish community composition of the examined sites, reflecting differences in species assemblages linked with both geographic area and depth range. Metaprobe eDNA data consistently returned a biodiversity ‘bonus’ mostly..., , , # Data from: Fishing in the gene-pool: implementing trawl-associated eDNA meta probe for large scale monitoring of fish assemblages

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.s7h44j1g3](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.s7h44j1g3)

Authors: Giulia Maiello, Andrea Bellodi, Alessia Cariani, Paolo Carpentieri, Laura Carugati, Davide Cicala, Alice Ferrari, Cristina Follesa, Alessandro Ligas, Paolo Sartor, Alice Sbrana, Peter Shum, Matteo Stefani, Lorenzo Talarico, Stefano Mariani, Tommaso Russo

#### Description of the data

This project contains raw reads data from rolls of gauze metaprobe samples collected in 21 sampling sites in the central Tyrrhenian Sea, Sardinian Sea, and Adriatic Sea. Raw reads files and ngsfilter files with sample barcodes are from two different libraries including the same samples amplified with 12S Tele02 and 12S Elas02 primers respectively.

**File 1: Elas02_S1_L001_R1_001.fastq.gz**

Elas02 forward FastQ file from the Illumina iSeq 2x150 bp run

**File 2: Elas02_S1_L001_R2_001...