Using museomics to investigate the gut bacteriome of fish from the Gulf of Carpentaria

The objective of this study was to examine the utility of archival fish collections for studying the gut bacteriome in marine fish using 16S rRNA amplicon-targeted sequencing. We selected seven fish species from two families, Labridae and Platycephalidae, which are well-represented in the Australian National Fish Collection (ANFC). Samples were collected from the Gulf of Carpentaria and stored at -20 C for 11 years. We evaluated the quality and quantity of DNA extracted from the fish gastrointestinal tract and the sequencing reads generated, describing the core and unique gut bacteriome constituents of these fish species, and created a baseline bacterial community dataset for future comparative investigations using contemporary specimens.