Mare-MAGE database A curated reference database of fish mitochondrial genes

Biodiversity assessment approaches based on molecular biology techniques such as NGS, metabarcoding, RAD-seq, or SnaPshot sequencing, are increasingly used in assessing marine and aquatic ecosystems. In this study, we present a new reference database for fish meta-barcoding based on mitochondrial genes. The Mare-MAGE database contains quality-checked sequences of the mitochondrial genes for 12S ribosomal RNA and Cytochrome c Oxidase I. All sequences were obtained from the National Center for Biotechnology Information- GenBank (NBCI-GenBank) and the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA) and have undergone intensive processing. They were checked for false annotations and non-target anomalies, according to the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) and FishBase. The dataset is compiled in ARB-Home, FASTA and Qiime2 formats, and is publicly available from the Mare-MAGE database website (http://mare-mage.weebly.com/ and https://figshare.com/projects/MARE-MAGE_database_Fish/90917). It includes altogether 231,333 COI and 12S rRNA gene sequences of fish covering 19,506 species of 4,058 genera and 586 families.