16S microbial data generated from sediment and water column samples collected from May 2010 to June 2012

Demultiplexed forward reads and mapping file for 709 16S amplicon GoM samples. Bacterial communities associated with sediment and water column samples collected as described above were analyzed by first extracting DNA as per standard protocols http://www.earthmicrobiome.org/emp-standard-protocols/dna-extraction-protocol/). This protocol uses a modified PowerSoil-htp 96 well DNA Isolation Kit (MoBio) with an epMotion 5075 Vac robotic platform (Eppendorf, Hauppauge, NY). DNA was amplified in triplicate using bacterial and archaeal primers 515F and 806R that target the V4-V5 hypervariable region of the 16S rRNA gene in E. coli. Specific methods are outlined by the Earth Microbiome Project (http://www.earthmicrobiome.org/emp-standard-protocols/16s/) and also described in (Caporaso et al., 2012).Amplified samples were barcoded and run on a single MiSeq run generating between 500-200,000 reads per sample..