Mare-MAGE curated reference database of fish mitochondrial genes

Biodiversity assessment approaches based on molecular biology techniques such as metabarcoding, RAD-seq, or SnaPshot sequencing are increasingly applied in assessing marine and aquatic ecosystems. Here we present a new reference database for fish meta-barcoding based on mitochondrial genes. The Mare-MAGE database contains quality-checked sequences of the mitochondrial 12S ribosomal RNA and Cytochrome c Oxidase I gene. All sequences were obtained from the National Center for Biotechnology Information- GenBank (NBCI-GenBank), the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA), AquaGene Database and BOLD database, and have undergone intensive processing. They were checked for false annotations and non-target anomalies, according to the Integrated Taxonomic Information System (ITIS) and FishBase. The dataset is compiled in ARB-Home, FASTA and Qiime2 formats, and is publicly available from the Mare-MAGE database website ( http://mare-mage.weebly.com/ ). It includes altogether 231,333 COI and 12S rRNA gene sequences of fish, covering 19,506 species of 4,058 genera and 586 families.