16S, OmeSeq-qRRS, and shotgun sequencing of maize rhizosphere

Samples collected from rhizosphere of mutant and wild type maize inbreds were obtained for three different library preparation methods (16S amplicon, and OmeSeq-qRRS and shotgun sequencing). These datasets were used for evaluating the performance of a software, Qmatey, that automates a pipeline for fast exact matching-based alignment and strain-level taxonomic binning and profiling of metagenomes. The datasets also allowed for comparison of the three 3 library preparations methods and their ability to capture the metagenomic community. While 16S amplicon sequencing was limited to bacterial taxa, OmeSeq-qRRS and shotgun sequencing identified taxa more broadly across various taxonomic groups from viruses to higher eukaryotes. The latter two also identified more taxa with each taxonomic group.