Fungal communities associated with basalt grains in an enhanced weathering experiment with Sorghum bicolor

This data-set is part of a study examining enhanced rock weathering as a strategy for carbon dioxide capture. Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor) was grown in a UK agricultural soil with a commercial arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungal inoculum (PlantWorks UK Ltd, Sittingbourne, UK) both with and without basalt amendment. Root-excluding nylon mesh bags (35 µm pore diameter) filled with basalt particles (53–150 µm) were placed in the top 15 cm of soil and collected at the end of the experiment 121 days later. To investigate basalt-fungal interactions, the fungal community in two basalt bags was characterised using MiSeq amplicon sequencing of partial 5.8S, ITS2 and partial 28S fungal sequences. Amplification was achieved using primers gITS7 (Ihrmark et al. 2012) and ITS4 (White et al 1990) and dual indexes were added to both samples. Sequencing was performed using 250bp paired end sequencing on a MiSeq sequencer (Illumina Inc, at The Earlham Institute, Norwich, UK).