Northeast Atlantic, NorthAmerican Boreal Atlantic and Norwegian-Arctic Atlantic

Concentrations of biopolymers in water bodies; Zoobenthos taxonomic abundance; Fish taxonomy-related counts

Thermal cyclers

This dataset consists of raw DNA sequencing files, processing code and metadata used to investigate environmental DNA persistence in marine sponges. All data were collected between July 2020 and April 2022 from marine sponge sampling in the North Atlantic Ocean, specifically the Northeast Atlantic, North American Boreal Atlantic and the Norwegian-Arctic Atlantic. Environmental DNA from sponges were extracted using a Qiagen DNeasy Blood and Tissue Kit and amplified using polymerase chain reactions with Tele02 primers. The libraries generated were sequenced on an Illumina iSeq100 using iSeq i1 Reagent v2, which were subsequently compared to reference sequence libraries to statistically map out taxonomic assignments of the species detected. The data from this project is being used to investigate how natural environmental DNA samplers can be used as a tool to assess marine biodiversity and what future scenarios this monitoring method can be applied to. The data collected from this project were funded by the NERC Discovery Science grant 'SpongeDNA - Bolstering marine biodiversity exploration and monitoring through natural environmental DNA samplers' (grant reference NE/T007028/1), awarded to principal investigator Professor Stefano Mariani at Liverpool John Moores University, School of Biological and Environmental Science.

Liverpool John Moores University School of Natural Sciences & Psychology
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