Bacterial Communities Shed by Montastraea cavernosa Coral Fragments into Filtered Seawater Mesocosms-Raw Data

The files in this data release contain an amplicon sequence variant (ASV) table and the raw 16S rRNA gene amplicon files from six 0.22-micron size fractions of tangential flow filtration-concentrated microbial communities (Mcav17, Mcav18, McH-101, McH-103, McD-57, and McD-58) derived from mesocosms consisting of filtered seawater in which either healthy or diseased fragments of Montastraea cavernosa had been incubated, as well as sequence files of a mock community and extraction kit blank. The coral fragments were collected between April 2018 and November 2020, from various locations throughout the Florida Keys. Mesocosms were set up by placing the coral fragments into filtered seawater for 4-5 days and then the fragments were removed so the water could be processed. Mesocosms were inoculated at the Smithsonian Marine Station, in Fort Pierce, Florida during two separate trips: one in October 2019 and the other in November 2020. The mock community was sequenced in order to assess any biases in the sequencing technology, while the extraction blank was sequenced in order to identify any contaminants in the DNA extraction kit.

Extraction of DNA from the 0.22 micrometer cellulose nitrate filters occurred on March 1, 2021, at the USGS Coral Microbial Ecology Laboratory in St. Petersburg, FL, using Qiagen's DNeasy PowerBiofilm kit. PCR amplification and sequencing were performed by RTSF Genomics Core at Michigan State University (East Lansing, MI) using 515f/806r primers to target the V4 region of the 16S rRNA gene on a MiSeq sequencing system with v2 chemistry to obtain paired-end 250-bp reads. The raw data files associated with this data release have also been submitted to the NCBI Sequence Read Archive under BioProject number PRJNA731170. For more information, please see the README file and metadata files.

Note: The data release was versioned on November 22, 2021. Please see Suggested Citation section for details.