title: Metagenome of benthic deep-sea protists: sediment from abyssal plains
design: Sediment samples were pre-washed with three washing solutions to improve the success of DNA amplification by PCR in marine sediments  DNA was extracted using the DNeasy Power Lyzer Power Soil DNA isolation kit (Qiagen). PCR amplifications of the hyper-variable loop V9 of the 18S rDNA gene was performed with the Phusion High-Fidelity DNA Polymerase (ThermoFisher) and the forward/reverse primer-pair 1389F and 1510R (Amaral-Zettler et al., 2009)