Succession of bacterial communities during a 6-month biofouling experiment in the Arabian Gulf

The development of a mature biofouling community on solid surfaces in the marine environment primarily involves the availability of colonizing bacterial communities and their ability to persist over time in any given environment. This study aims to investigate the temporal and spatial changes in bacterial co-occurrence patterns within mature biofilms developed on artificial acrylic panels in the Arabian Gulf, using Illumina amplicon sequencing of the V3-V4 hypervariable region of the 16S rRNA gene.