DOI: 10.5061/dryad.d76d1
title: Data from: Persistence of marine fish environmental DNA and the influence of sunlight

description: Harnessing information encoded in environmental DNA (eDNA) in marine
 waters has the potential to revolutionize marine biomonitoring. Whether
 using organism-specific quantitative PCR assays or metabarcoding in
 conjunction with amplicon sequencing, scientists have illustrated that
 realistic organism censuses can be inferred from eDNA. The next step is
 establishing ways to link information obtained from eDNA analyses to
 actual organism abundance. This is only possible by understanding the
 processes that control eDNA concentrations. The present study uses
 mesocosm experiments to study the persistence of eDNA in marine waters and
 explore the role of sunlight in modulating eDNA persistence. We seeded
 solute-permeable dialysis bags with water containing indigenous eDNA and
 suspended them in a large tank containing seawater. Bags were subjected to
 two treatments: half the bags were suspended near the water surface where
 they received high doses of sunlight, and half at depth where they
 received lower doses of sunlight. Bags were destructively sampled over the
 course of 87 hours. eDNA was extracted from water samples and used as
 template for a Scomber japonicus qPCR assay and a marine fish-specific 12S
 rRNA PCR assay. The latter was subsequently sequenced using a
 metabarcoding approach. S. japonicus eDNA, as measured by qPCR, exhibited
 first order decay with a rate constant ~0.01 hr -1 with no difference in
 decay rate constants between the two experimental treatments. eDNA
 metabarcoding identified 190 organizational taxonomic units (OTUs)
 assigned to varying taxonomic ranks. There was no difference in marine
 fish communities as measured by eDNA metabarcoding between the two
 experimental treatments, but there was an effect of time. Given the
 differences in UVA and UVB fluence received by the two experimental
 treatments, we conclude that sunlight is not the main driver of fish eDNA
 decay in the experiments. However, there are clearly temporal effects that
 need to be considered when interpreting information obtained using eDNA
 approaches.
description: OTU table after
 bioinformatics pipelineTable of OTUs (rows) by
 sample (columns) after bioinformatics pipeline. See "OTUs fasta
 file" for representative sequences of each OTU. See "metadata
 file" to match library and tag number of samples to sample
 names.OTU_table.csvOTUs fasta fileList of representative sequences for each OTU; to be paired with OTU tableOTUs.fastametadata fileList of samples sequenced with library and tag combinations; to be paired to OTU tabledecay_meta.csvOTU table for blanksBlanks were run on separate sequencing run. This file is the OTU table for the blanks including their annotation based on the same criteria outlined in the manuscript.OTU_table_for_blanks.xlsxLibrary 1 fastq file read 1eaa-decay1_S1_L001_R1_001.fastq.gzLibrary 1 fastq file read 2eaa-decay1_S1_L001_R2_001.fastq.gzLibrary 2 fastq file read 1eaa-decay2_S2_L001_R1_001.fastq.gzLibrary 2 fastq file read 2eaa-decay2_S2_L001_R2_001.fastq.gzLibrary 3 fastq file read 1eaa-decay3_S3_L001_R1_001.fastq.gzLibrary 3 fastq file read 2eaa-decay3_S3_L001_R2_001.fastq.gz