AquaDiva: Whole-metagenome shotgun sequencing of a groundwater ecosystem of the Hainich Critical Zone Exploratory

The CRC AquaDiva (www.aquadiva.uni-jena.de) focuses on the important roles of water (Aqua) and biodiversity (Diva) for shaping the structure, properties, and functions of the subsurface, the part of the Earth's Critical Zone (CZ) that begins below the highest density of plant roots and extends down into the first aquifers. In this study, we generated short-read sequencing data for 32 groundwater samples from a well-characterized monitoring transect of the Hanich Critical Zone Exploratory (NW Thuringia, Germany) that encompasses 15 monitoring wells spread across a hillslope. Groundwater was collected from five wells (namely H14, H32, H41, H43, H51, H52) and was sequentially filtered through 0.2 uM, and 0.1 uM PTFE filters (142 mm, Omnipore Membrane, Merck Millipore, Germany). Filters were immediately frozen on dry ice and transported to a -80 C freezer. Library preparation and sequencing were performed with the help of the Core Facility DNA Sequencing at the Leibniz Institute on Aging (FLI, Jena, Germany). Briefly, libraries for all 32 samples were prepared using the NEB Next Ultra II DNA kit and multiplexed on four lanes on a NextSeq500 using 300 cycles for sequncing yielding 150 bp paired-end reads.