Emerging genetic technologies such as environmental DNA (eDNA) analyses provide complementary approaches and even sometimes alternatives to logistically complex and costly biodiversity surveys. eDNA can detect the presence of species and characterize fish community assemblages in coastal and marine environments, even where traditional methods are hard or impossible to deploy due to currents, bottom structure, or visibility for example.

To date, studies have often targeted single or few species at a time, but metabarcoding methods can in theory be applied to any fish species. The most used eDNA molecular barcodes for species identification leverage a hypervariable part of the 12S rDNA gene (MiFish primers) and a polymorphic region of the COI gene (PS1 primers). For specific applications and refined species identifications, primers sometimes need to be designed in longer or more variable parts of the mitochondrial genome.

Together, eDNA will likely soon become one of the most rapid and cost-effective ways to survey and monitor fish presence and species assemblages for resource and ecosystem management.

However, a technical gap preventing the broad use of eDNA to monitor fish in the Gulf is the incompleteness of reference genetic databases as accurate species identification relies entirely on the presence in public databases of trusted reference sequences for each species.

The objective of this emerging project is thus to produce complete mitochondrial genome reference sequences for all marine and diadromous fish species of the Gulf to enable the widespread use of eDNA in fish surveys and monitoring efforts.

In this presentation I will thus invite anyone interested to join this endeavor and to collaborate in securing representative specimens for each species and in generating new publicly available data to build a strong and comprehensive genetic reference database for the Gulf’s fishes.