Metabarcoding of marine benthic protists from the Azores

Protists are key components of the microbial food web in pelagic marine systems by linking algal and bacterial production to higher trophic levels, but their functioning and vertical distribution in benthic ecosystems are still only poorly understood. However, vertical biogeographical patterns of communities can be coupled to the functioning of ecosystems and are therefore important to understand ecological and evolutionary processes. In this project, we investigated the diversity and distribution of benthic protist communities from the sublittoral down to the deep seafloor (50-2000 m) around three islands of the Azores in the North Atlantic Ocean. DNA was extracted from sediment samples and submitted to high-throughput sequencing (V9 region of the hypervariable 18S rDNA).