Microbial DNA preservation and possible community artifacts for field-based research in tropical peatlands

Peatlands, including those recently discovered in the Amazonia region, are important stocks of carbon and may shift in its role towards a carbon source. Sampling methods and the microbial community survey reports associated with peat should be revisited and/or standardized due to its sensitive sampling and required transport. This work compares the effect of chemical buffers on the preservation or stabilization of the microbiome of the original state when sampling, or prior to incubation (as in this study).The 16S rRNA sequences deposited were demultiplexed in two iterations of our demultiplexing script (https://github.com/Hinsby/Manta_Illumina_amplicon_demultiplexing) resulting in a combination of .fasta and .fastq files. Please email with the corresponding author (or sequence depositor) with any questions.