Supplementary data for the study: Whole forest in a pouch? Methods converge in uncovering wood ants’ fungal and bacterial microbiota

The dataset consists of Supplementary data collected for the study "Whole forest in a pouch? Methods converge in uncovering wood ants’ fungal and bacterial microbiota".Study aimed to characterize ant–microbial interaction networks in the forest floor by profiling fungal and bacterial communities associated with the IBP of Formica polyctena ants. To assess the fungal community composition of the IBP, three methods were used: direct microscopy, culturing supplemented with barcoding of representative strains (ITS and LSU regions), and multi-marker DNA metabarcoding (ITS1, ITS2, and 18S rRNA regions). To characterize the bacterial community of the IBP, 16S rRNA metabarcoding was used. Aditionally, ecological specificity of the microbiota was determined by assessing the environmental distribution of fungal and bacterial Amplicon Sequence Variants (ASVs) abundantly found in the pellets through comparisons with sequences stored in the NCBI database.Supplementary file contains 12 Supplementary Tables and a README file:ST1: Sampling metadata.ST2: Data of the microscopy part of the study. Level of broad taxonomic categories.ST3: Data of the microscopy part of the study. Level of specific fungal morphotypes.ST4: Details of representative fungal strains obtained in the culturing part of the study: metadata, fungarium vouchers, GenBank ID numbers of associated sequences.ST5: Data of the culturing part of the study. ST6: Details on samples used in the DNA metabarcoding part of the study.ST7: Decontaminated data of the DNA metabarcoding part for ITS2 rRNA marker and ASV level.ST8: Decontaminated data of the DNA metabarcoding part for ITS1 rRNA marker and ASV level.ST9: Decontaminated data of the DNA metabarcoding part for 18S rRNA marker and ASV level.ST10: Decontaminated data of the DNA metabarcoding part for 16S rRNA marker and ASV level.ST11: Decontaminated data of the DNA metabarcoding part for 16S rRNA marker and OTU level.ST12: Data of the ecological specificity assessment.