Sediment-associated bacterial community and predictive functionalities are influenced by choice of 16S ribosomal RNA hypervariable region(s): An amplicon-based diversity study

To decipher the impact of methodological challenges such as selection of suitable hyper-variable region(s) of 16S rRNA gene, marine sediments were collected from the southern coastal region of India. Bacterial community composition was analyzed using Illumina MiSeq sequencing to assess the performance of five widely used primer pairs encompassing V1-V3, V3-V4, V4, V5-V6 and V7-V9 hyper-variable region(s) of 16S rRNA gene.