cored basalts from Mid-Atlantic Ridge, North Pond Raw sequence reads. subsurface metagenome

This project sought to address a fundamental aim of the international scientific ocean drilling community to better understand life in the marine deep biosphere – namely, to document the organisms living in deep habitats, to determine how abundant they are, how they acquire energy and carbon for growth, and to evaluate the impact that deep life has on global biogeochemical systems (Iodp 2001; Iodp 2011). To this end, we extracted environmental DNA from North Pond basalts and sequenced the V4 hypervariable region of the 16S ribosomal RNA (16S rRNA) gene in the DNA extracts.