The SCALEMIC-Experiment: Spatiotemporal distributions of microbial communities at the plot scale in a grassland soil. ScaleMic-Bac

Our study aims at elucidating the spatio-temporal dynamics of Bacteria in soils by high throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA. Our experimental plot (a medium managed grassland site located in the Swabian Alb) has been established previously within the framework of the Biodiversity Exploratories project of the DFG (SFB 1384). In order to identify acidobacterial diversity and activity, Illumina paired end sequencing of the variable region 3 of the ribosomal RNA was conducted for 358 soil samples from the exploratory site, divided between 6 sampling dates from April to November 2011, and following a 6 x 10m grid. The amplicon library were constructed using general primers targeting all bacteria. Thus, this study contains all reads annotated as Bacteria with the RDP-classifier. Reads have been trimmed, decontaminated from undesired primer dimerisation products, joined and tagged by sample with inhouse tools.