Diversity and distribution of microbial eukaryotes in the sediment of active cold seeps in the northern South China Sea

Microbial eukaryotes play prominent roles in the biogeochemical cycles in deep-sea cold seep ecosystems, where a comprehensive analysis of the stratified sediments from different cold seep sites has not been conducted. Here, we utilized high-throughput sequencing data to investigate how the structure and diversity of microbial community shift in the stratified sediment habitats along the spatial scales.