Plant responses to and microbial community composition of greenhouse soils growing Phragmites australis

To determine how native and non-native lineages of Phragmites australis affect and respond to soil bacteria, fungi and oomycetes, we collected live rhizomes, seeds and soil from native and non-native lineages of Phragmites from 10 sites within Michigan and Ohio, USA. We propagated these field-collected samples to carry out a reciprocal-transplant plant-soil feedback experiment with multiple microbial inhibition treatments. Specifically, we investigated how each Phragmites lineage grew in soils pre-conditioned by each lineage and soils that had been pre-sterilized. Plant biomass was the main response variable collected to determine responses to microbial soil conditioning. We also used DNA meta-barcoding to identify the effects of each plant lineage on soil microbes and link plant responses to microbial communities. Specifically, DNA was extracted from soils and fungal and bacterial DNA was amplified to identify the microbial constituents. Amplicons were sequenced using Illumina MiSeq. This dataset includes outputs of bioinformatic analysis of sequences including operational taxonomic unit (OTU) generation, OTU abundance, resolved taxonomy, and environmental metadata collected in our survey. Raw sequences were uploaded to the NCBI Sequence Read Archive under SRA accession number PRJNA719385.