MOCK

Benthic prokaryotic communities are influenced by their interactions with other benthic communities such as micro-eukaryotes and meiofaunal invertebrates. It is thus of paramount importance to adopt a holistic approach, analysing all members of the benthic community, to fully understand their organization and functioning. However, meiofaunal representative eDNA is difficult to obtain because of their low abundance, which is an important limitation to such integrative approach. Hence, we developped a new strategy for the simultaneous analysis of microbial (bacteria, archaea and micro-eukaryotes) and meiofaunal benthic communities, which includes DNA extraction and mock communities. Mock communities were used to evaluate the DNA extraction strategy biases. These mock communities included organisms from the three domains of life: bacteria, archaea and eukaryotes (micro-eukaryotes and meiofaunal invertebrates). The DNA extraction strategy was applied using three conditions for the mock communities: (i) varying eukaryotes abundance, (ii) salted or fresh meiofauna and (iii) the presence or not of sediments. The DNA extraction strategy allows to detect most organisms present in the mock communities.