The nema_novaseq_raw dataset contains DNA reads from a total of 156 samples including extraction negatives, and nematodes. The purpose of the study was to investigate the trophic interactions of Arctic meiobenthic nematodes using a "brute force" prey metabarcoding approach (Flo et al., 2024). Sediment was collected on four locations (process stations P1, P4, P6 and P7) along a transect from the Barents Sea to the Arctic Nansen Basin in August 2019 (Q3), December 2019 (Q4), March 2021 (Q1) and April/May 2021 (Q2) with a box-corer, and fixed on ice-cold ethanol (96%, -20 deg C). Up to 11 biological replicates of nematodes were picked from each station from each cruise, and the samples are named accordingly (i.e. nm_1_7_11 contains a nematode from cruise Q1, station P7, and biological replicate number 11). Replicate number 12 in each set if samples (i.e. nm_1_7_12) are always extraction negatives. DNA from picked specimen were extracted using the E.Z.N.A Tissue DNA kit (Omega Bio-Tek), and tested for contamination by amplification of V7 18S SSU rDNA and subsequent 1% gel-electrophoresis. We amplified the 18S SSU rRNA V7 region (~100 – 110 bp) with 18S_allshorts primers (Forward 5’-TTTGTCTGSTTAATTSCG-3’, and Reverse 5’-GCAATAACAGGTCTGTG-3’, Guardiola et al., 2015) and sequenced cleaned product on two lanes of the Illumina Novaseq platform using 150 PE chemistry. The raw data was explored and processed on an HPC into a zOTU-table with sample-wise numerical abundances and taxonomy from the Protist Ribosomal database (PR2/v.4.14.0), using a combination of FastQC/0.11.9, BLAST+/2.8.1, OBITools/1.2.12 and VSEARCH/2.9.1 utilities. More information about processing, including scripts used - is openly available on github (https://github.com/snflo/bruteforce).