Miniaturised laboratorial equipment as a solution to implement conservation genetics tools and education in West African countries with limited infrastructures: an application to the study of illegal wildlife trade in Guinea-Bissau

Illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is considered one of the largest global illegal industries that negatively impacts biodiversity and sustainable development worldwide. DNA barcoding coupled with high-throughput sequencing has been shown to be useful in identifying taxa affected by IWT and has been routinely used during the last decades. However, for countries lacking laboratory infrastructures and sequencing units or trained staff, the application of DNA barcoding tools in conservation actions and policies is limited and dependent on slow sample export processes and molecular analyses carried out abroad. Guinea-Bissau (GB) is located on the West-African coast and has one of the lowest human development indices worldwide, while being a biodiversity hotspot facing many conservation challenges due to illegal commercial hunting and trade in bushmeat and live individuals. Here, we explore the potential of using inexpensive and portable miniaturised laboratory equipment (MLE) to i) identify speci..., This study used 33 tissue samples collected as part of other studies that investigated wild meat hunting, trade and consumption in several locations in Guinea-Bissau (Minhós et al. 2013; Ferreira da Silva et al. 2021).
DNA was extracted using ThermoFisher’s MagMAX DNA Multi-Sample Ultra 2.0 Kit on the ThermoFisher Kingfisher Apex DNA extraction platform using default parameters. For the PCR amplification we used (1) primers designed by Gaubert et al. (2015) for the identification of bushmeat samples that amplify the first 402 bp of cytochrome b (cyt b) and a 390 bp of the 12S region, and (2) approximately 250 bp of the 16S rRNA gene using primers from Vences et al. (2016) that were designed to amplify vertebrate DNA from environmental DNA samples. Fragments were amplified by PCR in 30ul total volume reaction, using 15 ul of Qiagen Multiplex PCR Mix (Qiagen, GER), 0.6 uM of forward and reverse primers and 1ul of DNA. Thermal cycling was p..., # Miniaturised laboratorial equipment as a solution to implement conservation genetics tools and education in West African countries with limited infrastructures: an application to the study of illegal wildlife trade in Guinea-Bissau

Dataset DOI: [10.5061/dryad.rfj6q57n2](10.5061/dryad.rfj6q57n2)

## Description of the data and file structure

Three independent sequence alignments of 33 samples for fragments of mitochondrial DNA cyt b, 12S, and 16S genes.

Samples codes and species identification in the work is described in the following table:

| **Samples ID** | **Species identification in this work** | | | |
| :------------- | :-------------------------------------- | :------------------------ | ------------------------- | - |
| | **cytb** | **12S** | **16S** | |
| 224 | *C. petaurista* | *C. petaurista* ...,