Treated like dirt: Robust forensic and ecological inferences from soil eDNA after challenging sample storage

We investigated the effect of storage duration and conditions on the assessment of the soil biota with eDNA metabarcoding. We extracted eDNA from freshly collected soil samples and again from the same samples after storage under contrasting temperature conditions and contrasting exposure (open/closed tubes). We used four different primer sets targeting bacteria, fungi, protists (cercozoans), and general eukaryotes. We quantified differences in richness, evenness, and community composition. Subsequently, we tested whether we could correctly infer habitat type and original sample identity after storage using a large reference dataset.

This repository contains the un-demultiplexed fastq sequences.

Methods
A soil sample was split into 108 smaller samples, that were stored in different ways (temperature, exposure and time). Biodiversity changes were assessed with metabarcoding using 4 different markers.

This repository contains the paired end Illumina MiSeg fastq data for all amplicons in the study.