Äspö 16S plus metagenomes from anaerobic enrichment cultures

In this study, anaerobic enrichment cultures were set up to investigate microbial interactions. To do so, three subsurface aquifers intersected by boreholes as part of the Äspö HRL were used as inoculum. To investigate growth of smaller cells, larger cells were removed from the inoculum. The microbial communities in the cultures were characterized using 16S rRNA gene amplicons (Illumina HiSeq 2 x 300 bp), allowing to generate hypothesis on interactions and to select cultures for metagenomics (Illumina NovaSeq 6000 2 x 150 bp) based on composition. The reconstructed genomes were used to further investigate potential interactions by assessing genomic potential.