18S rRNA V9 metabarcoding of eukaryotes in the Kuroshio Region

As the first metabarcoding survey covering the Kuroshio current region from the offshore of Okinawa to the south of Honshu, we targeted the biogeography of free-living dinoflagellates and their relation to ambient environments, for it is the first step to decipher the food web structure and dynamics of this oligotrophic but highly productive current in the northwest Pacific Ocean. We chose eukaryotic universal primers to amplify the 18S rRNA V9 region to include as many dinoflagellate species as possible.