by boiling, meagre fillet can maintain EPA and DHA at adequate levels for the human diet, although cooking leads to lipids loss [5]. In market, meagre is mainly sold fresh (whole gutted or un-gutted stored in ice, and fillets, or slices at low temperatures).  
Fresh fish spoils faster than other foods of animal origin, due to microbial activity. Microorganisms in fish come from the environment wherein fish lives and from various sources of contamination in post-farm gate e.g., harvesting, handling, packaging, processing, and distribution [7]. Bacterial communities of fresh fish are much affected by post-harvest practices, such as handling, gutting, and filleting [8]. In storage, temperature and packaging conditions determine the predominant spoilage microbiota of fish. A small consortium of bacterial genera or species of the initial total microbiota of fish cause the deterioration of quality. These bacteria, the so-called Specific Spoilage Organisms (SSOs), present higher growth rates than the rest microbiota, under specific storage conditions, and produce metabolites responsible for off-odors and off-flavors when their population reaches the spoilage levels of 7-9 logs [9; 10; 11]. The production of Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs) mainly alcohols, aldehydes, ketones, organic acids, and esters has been linked with quality deterioration of fish during storage [9]. Such information is well known for a variety of seafoods, also including the gift-head seabream and the European sea bass [12; 13; 14]; the most important fish species of the Mediterranean aquaculture. In the literature, there is only one publication on the volatile profile of meagre, but it concerns the raw fish before storage [15] and not the changes during storage.  
Until last decade, the determination of seafood spoilage microbiota was routinely studied by both culture-dependent [16; 17] and culture-independent techniques [18; 19; 20; 21]. However, the advent of Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) and specifically the application of 16S rRNA amplicon-based metabarcoding analysis has revolutionized the way of seafood spoilage microbiota evaluation, providing a clear snapshot of microbial communities present, highlighting in parallel the presence of many bacterial groups in several seafood products, that escaped from conventional approaches [22; 23; 24]. It is crucial to point out that this method reveals both cultivable and non-cultivable microbiota directly from seafood and thus, it constitutes a rational way to enrich the current knowledge about the microbiota formation during storage and more importantly, at the end of fish shelf-life.  
To our knowledge, no information is available in the literature, regarding the spoilage analysis during storage of meagre (whole and filleted), using such modern microbiological and analytical techniques. The aim of this study was (a) to record sensory, microbial population, and chemical changes, particularly VOCs determination using headspace Solid Phase Micro-Extraction--Gas Chromatography/Mass Spectrometry (SPME-GC/MS), and (b) to assess microbial communities' composition through 16S metabarcoding analysis, in whole and filleted meagre during storage at 0 (ice) and 4 \({}^{\circ}\)C, respectively, to get information for the spoilage status of this kind of fish. The importance of determining the microbial and VOCs profile during storage (and more importantly at the end of shelf-life) of a food product is undeniable, while the use of modernized techniques to unveil the hitherto \"unknown profile\" of such kind of fish, is of great industrial and scientific interest.