Metagenomic sequencing of bacterial and archaeal communities in the marine protected area in Sulaibikhat Bay, Kuwait

A marine protected area has been established within the waters of Sulaibikhat Bay in Kuwait as part of an effort by the United Nations to compensate the State of Kuwait for the environmental damages incurred during the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait in 1990. This project aimed to provide scientists, researchers, and policy makers with baseline information about the communities of microbes (specifically, bacteria and archaea) residing within these waters. The investigation relied upon shotgun metagenomic sequencing at a depth of about 20 M paired end reads per sample, which allows for microbial community profiling up to the species level. A total of six samples were collected from the Bay during the period between November 2019 and November 2020 with some interruptions in sampling caused by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Seawater samples were filtered through a 0.2 um filter membrane and the membrane was subsequently used as the starting material for DNA extraction using the PowerSoil DNA isolation kit as per manufacturer's instructions. DNA library preparation and shotgun metagenomic sequencing were all performed by a service provider in the U.S. (Admera Health; https://www.admerahealth.com/).