Microbial diversity in moonmilks of Baeg-nyong cave, Korean CZO

The Baeg-nyong cave is a limestone cave, part of which has been nominated as the first critical zone observatory (CZO) in South Korea. Moonmilk is a well-known speleothem composed of various carbonate minerals. To characterize moonmilk from the Baeg-nyong cave, we performed mineralogical analyses and applied next generation sequencing-based metagenomics to analyze the microbial communities, including bacteria and fungi, of dry and wet moonmilk samples.