oil sands metagenome Targeted loci environmental. oil sands metagenome

For this project we obtained amplicon sequences of the nifH gene, which is the marker gene used to survey nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the environment. The sequences were obtained from oil-contaminated and post-cleanup samples from Pensacola Beach, Florida, USA following the Macondo oil well blowout in 2010 in the Gulf of Mexico. Using this data, we identified nitrogen fixers that were more abundant in the presence of the oil by comparing heavily oiled vs. clean sand layers in a depth profile of the beach.