Salt Marsh Sediment PIE-LTER Massachusetts Raw sequence reads. Salt Marsh Sediment PIE-LTER Massachusetts

Subtidal sediment was sampled along two salt marsh creeks, from freshwater head to saline outlet, at Plum Island Ecosystems Long Term Ecological Research site (PIE-LTER) north of Boston. Greenwood Creek has had the Ipswich, MA sewage outfall at its head for more than 60 years. Egypt Creek also has a freshwater head but no sewage input. Sediment sampling was conducted in triplicate at each of 6 locations along each creek, along the salinity gradient. Extracted DNA was used for shotgun metagenomic and amplicon sequencing of microbial communities, to assess effects of (1) the salinity gradient along both creeks, and (2) the long-term exposure to sewage inputs to Greenwood Creek. Shotgun metagenomic sequencing was conducted on samples from only 5 sites along each creek; the most saline site was excluded for both creeks given limitations on numbers of samples per Illumina HiSeq lane. Bacterial v4v5 amplicon sequencing was conducted on all 36 samples (Illumina MiSeq). Research was conducted as part of the NSF IGERT training program "Reverse Ecology: Computational Integration of Genomes, Organisms, and Environments," PI David Rand at Brown University (Providence, RI) and the Marine Biological Laboratory (Woods Hole, MA).