Data for: Heavy metal pollution impacts soil bacterial community structure and antimicrobial resistance at the Birmingham 35th Avenue Superfund Site

The data in this archive are the results of a study on the impact of heavy metals (HMs) on the soil microbiota of an urban Superfund site in Alabama. HMs are known to modify bacterial communities both in the laboratory and in situ. Consequently, soils in HM-contaminated sites such as the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund sites are predicted to have altered ecosystem functioning, with potential ramifications for the health of organisms, including humans, that live nearby. Further, several studies have shown that heavy metal-resistant (HMR) bacteria often also display antimicrobial resistance (AMR), and therefore HM-contaminated soils could potentially act as reservoirs that could disseminate AMR genes into human-associated pathogenic bacteria. To explore this possibility, topsoil samples were collected from six public locations in the zip code 35207 (the home of the North Birmingham 35th Avenue Superfund Site) and in six public areas in the neighboring zip code, 35214...., Full methods are contained in our publication \"Heavy Metal Pollution Impacts Soil Bacterial Community Structure and Antimicrobial Resistance at the Birmingham 35th Avenue Superfund Site\" in Microbiology Spectrum. Briefly, we collected soils from replicate locations in two zip codes in North Birmingham, Alabama. One zip code contains the heavy-metal-polluted 35th Avenue Superfund Site, and the second is demographically comparable but outside of the Superfund borders. Using a mixture of culture-based and next generation sequencing approaches, we characterized the microbial communities and their levels of heavy metal and antibiotic resistance in both zip codes to test the hypothesis that chronic anthropogenic metal contamination selects for antimicrobial resistance in environmental bacterial populations., All of our analyses can be run using R, mothur, and QIIME, all of which are open-source.