MicroEukaryote Diversity in the East China Sea / Kuroshio Current

We investigated eukaryotic microbial diversity in water samples collected at cruise stations visited during the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology (JAMSTEC) MR17-03C cruise to the East China Sea aboard the R/V Mirai in May and June 2017. Two replicates of 4.5 L of seawater were collected by bucket at each of 6 cruise stations. The plankton community was size fractionated by sequentially filtering water through 10.0 and 0.2 um filters. The v4 region of the 18S rRNA gene was amplified from DNA extracted from filters. Amplicon libraries were sequenced with the Illumina Mi-Seq sequencing platform using v3 chemistry.