Data from: An accessible metagenomic strategy allows for better characterization of invertebrate bulk samples

DNA-based techniques are a popular approach for assessing biodiversity in
ecological research, especially for organisms that are difficult to detect
or identify morphologically. Metabarcoding, the most established method
for determining species composition and relative abundance in bulk
samples, can be more sensitive and time- and cost-effective than
traditional morphological approaches. However, one drawback of this method
is PCR bias caused by between-species variation in the amplification
efficiency of a marker gene. Metagenomics, bypassing PCR amplification,
has been proposed as an alternative to overcome this bias. Several studies
have already shown the promising potential of metagenomics, but they all
indicate the unavailability of reference genomes for most species in any
ecosystem as one of the primary bottlenecks preventing its wider
implementation. This dataset is from a study that present a strategy which
combines unassembled reads of low-coverage whole genome sequencing and
publicly available reference genomes to construct a genomic reference
database, thus circumventing high sequencing costs and intensive
bioinformatic processing. This dataset was used to show that this approach
is superior to metabarcoding for approximating relative biomass of
macrobenthos species from bulk samples. Furthermore, these results can be
obtained with a sequencing effort comparable to metabarcoding. This
strategy can accelerate the implementation of metagenomics in biodiversity
assessments, as it should be relatively easy to adopt by laboratories
familiar with metabarcoding and can be used as an accessible alternative.