Microbial Diversity of Red Sea Urchin Loxechinus albus During Controlled Farming in Puerto Montt, Chile Using 16S rDNA Amplicon Sequencing

Loxechinus albus is a shallow water sea urchin, and its distribution is related with the cold water currents of the southern hemisphere. Chile produces around 30.000 tons per year, constituting an economically important species for local fishermen. The importance of bacterial communities, also called microbiota, in sea urchin health has been recently started to be explored. It has been suggested that urchin gut microbiota are responsible for differences in algal digestion and synthesis of essential long-chain fatty acids. In this study, we collected young specimens of the red sea urchin L. albus to characterize the body surface and gonad bacterial communities using 16S rDNA amplicon sequencing. A taxonomic abundance table, a map file for raw sequencing data and the phyloseq object used for figure respresentation are share in the link: https://figshare.com/projects/Loxechinus_albus_microbiota/66011.