Operational taxonomic units of deep-sea fishes from environmental DNA collected during Ramon Margalef cruise BIOMAN 2018 to the Bay of Biscay, with links to accession numbers

Analysis of fish environmental DNA (DNA traces released into the environment in form of tissue, mucus, feces, etc.) from several oceanic vertical profiles (from the surface up to 2000 m depth) along the continental slope of the Bay of Biscay. We provide the geographical location of each vertical profile, the station at which each sample belongs to, the depth, date, and hour at which each sample was collected, if the sampling was carried out during day or nighttime, and the water volume filtered. The accession numbers to the raw data of the sequenced samples (available on BioProject ID insdc:PRJNA759107) are also detailed. All samples were obtained by deploying a rosette sampler, and the surface ones were also collected using the continuous clean circuit intake of the vessel. The final operational taxonomic unit counts (OTUs) of the fish species were based on sequencing the mitochondrial 12S rRNA gene on an Illumina MiSeq platform, and taxonomic assignment to the World Register of Marine Species (WoRMS) and a local database restricted to fish species of the Northeast Atlantic and Mediterranean areas.