Time series of archaeal and bacterial 16S from an estuarine water column

These data represent a year-long time series (July 2020 through June 2021) of prokaryote 16S sequences from the water column of the mouth of the Broadkill River in Lewes, DE, a tidal estuarine river. The goal was to determine how the microbial community composition changed over time and how it was affected by environmental factors such as tidal stage, salinity, temperature, etc. Water samples were passed through a set of filters of different pore sizes prior to DNA extraction to partition the community into different size fractions, allowing for comparison between free-living and particle attached communities. An archaeal 16S primer set was used in addition to a universal primer set to better resolve changes in the archaeal community, as the community dynamics of archaea in estuarine water columns has been understudied.