Rapid species level identification of fish eggs by proteome fingerprinting using MALDI-TOF MS

Quantifying spawning biomass of commercially relevant fish species is important to generate fishing quotas. This will mostly rely on the annual or daily production of fish eggs. However, these have to be identified precisely to species level to obtain a reliable estimate of offspring production of the different species. Because morphological identification can be very difficult, recent developments are heading towards application of molecular tools. Methods such as COI barcoding have long handling times and cause high costs for single specimen identifications. In order to test MALDI-TOF MS, a rapid and cost-effective alternative for species identification, we identified fish eggs using COI barcoding and used the same specimens to set up a MALDI-TOF MS reference library. This library, constructed from two different MALDI-TOF MS instruments, was then used to identify unknown eggs from a different sampling occasion. By using a line of evidence from hierarchical clustering and different sup...

量化具有商业价值的鱼类的产卵生物量，对于制定捕捞配额至关重要。该评估工作主要依赖于鱼卵的年度或日产卵总量。然而，若要准确估算不同鱼类的子代产量，必须将采集到的鱼卵精准鉴定至物种水平。由于形态学鉴定的难度极高，当前相关研究正逐步转向分子鉴定工具的应用。诸如COI条形码（COI barcoding）这类分子鉴定方法，单样本鉴定的处理周期长且成本高昂。为了验证基质辅助激光解吸电离飞行时间质谱（MALDI-TOF MS）这一快速且经济高效的物种鉴定替代方案，本研究团队先通过COI条形码对鱼卵进行物种鉴定，并利用相同的实验样本构建了MALDI-TOF MS参考数据库。随后，利用两台不同MALDI-TOF MS仪器搭建的该参考数据库，对另一批次采样中获得的未知鱼卵开展了物种鉴定。本研究通过整合层级聚类分析及多种不同的佐证证据（原文此处内容未完整呈现）