The Southeast Pacific comprises two Large Marine Ecosystems, the Pacific Central-American Coastal and the Humboldt Current System; and is one of the less well known in the tropical subregions in terms of biodiversity. To address this, we compared DNA barcoding repositories with the marine biodiversity species for the Southeast Pacific. We obtained a checklist of marine species in the Southeast Pacific (i.e. Colombia, Ecuador, Chile, and Peru) from the Ocean Biodiversity Information System (OBIS) database and compared it with species available at the Barcoding of Life Data System (BOLD) repository. Of the 5504 species records retrieved from OBIS, 42% of them had at least one registered specimen in BOLD (including specimens around the world); however, only 4.5% of records corresponded to publicly available DNA barcodes including specimens collected from a Southeast Pacific country. The low...

The Rimac river is the main source of water for Lima, Peru's capital megacity. The river is constantly affected by different types of contamination including mine tailings in the Andes and urban sewage in the metropolitan area. In this work, we aim to produce the first characterization of aquatic bacterial communities in the Rimac river using a 16S rRNA metabarcoding approach which would be useful to identify bacterial diversity and potential understudied pathogens. We report a lower diversity in bacterial communities from the Lower Rimac (Metropolitan zone) in comparison to other sub-basins. Samples were generally grouped according to their geographical location. Bacterial classes Alphaproteobacteria, Bacteroidia, Campylobacteria, Fusobacteriia, and Gammaproteobacteria were the most frequent along the river. Arcobacter cryaerophilus (Campylobacteria) was the most frequent species in the...

Angel sharks are distributed worldwide in tropical to subtropical waters. Across the Eastern Pacific Ocean (EPO), two valid species are reported: The Pacific angelshark Squatina californica and the Chilean angelshark Squatina armata; however, there is still uncertainty about their geographic distribution, mainly along the northern Peru coast where the species have been reported to be sympatric. The aim of this study is to describe the genetic differences between the genus Squatina from the EPO, including samples from northern Peru, and using DNA barcoding and three species delimitation models: Poisson tree processes (PTP) model, Bayesian implementation of the PTP (bPTP) model and the general mixed Yule coalescent (GMYC) model. The three approaches summarized 19 nominal Squatina species in 23 consensus Molecular Taxonomic Units (MOTU). Only 16 of them were in accordance with taxonomic ide...