Project description:Desert microbial communities live in a pulsed ecosystem shaped by isolated and rare precipitation events. The Namib desert is one of the oldest continuously hyperarid ecosystems on Earth. In this study, surface microbial communities of open soils (without sheltering features like rocks, vegetation or biological soil crusts) are analysed. We designed an artificial rainfall experiment where a 7x7 (3.5 x 3.5 m) plot remained dry while an adjacent one received a 30 mm simulated rain. Samples were taken randomly in parallel from both plots at 10 min, 1 h, 3 h, 7 h, 24 h and 7 days after the watering moment. Duplicate libraries were generated from total (rRNA depleted) RNA and sequenced 2x150 bp in an Illumina Hiseq 4000 instrument.
Project description:Three-day metatranscriptome of surface gravel plain soils from the Central Namib Desert. Samples were collected at four times (6:00, 12:00, 18:00 and 24:00h) on each day (n=12). rRNA-depleted RNA was used to construct stranded libraries with the ScriptSeq v2 complete kit (Epicentre) adding unique barcodes in TruSeq adapters (ScriptSeq Index PCR primers, set 1, Epicentre). Libraries were single-end sequenced in a NextSeq 500 v2 sequencer, with read length of 75bp.
