Plant DNA metabarcoding data of Lake Ximen derived from sedimentary ancient DNA of a lacustrine sediment core

The dataset contains amplicon DNA raw sequence files from a long lacustrine sediment core of Lake Ximen (eastern Tibetan Plateau). Approximately 1 g of each sediment sample was extracted using the PowerMax®Soil DNA Isolation kit (Mo Bio Laboratories, Inc. USA). PCR was performed with the “g” and “h” universal plant primers for the P6 loop region of the chloroplast trnL (UAA) intron (Taberlet et al., 2007). Both primers were modified by adding an 8?bp tag with at least five different base pairs between each to the 5' end and three additional NNNs for improving cluster detection on Illumina sequencing platforms. NGS sequencing was conducted on a NextSeq sequencing system (Illumina) using the NextSeq Mid kit in 2x150 pairedend mode. The dataset contains an R1 and R2 raw read file which contains amplicon-sequences from 2 replicates of 135 sediment samples (total 270 PCR samples) covering a time period from 21 cal ka BP to present samples and 15 blank controls.