title: bacterial community present in fresh, surface, and subsurface bat guano collected from a Tadarida brasiliensis cave colony in Sierra County, New Mexico, USA.
design: The V4 hypervariable region of the 16S rRNA gene was amplified using the HotSartTaq Plus Master Mix Kit (Qiagen, USA) using the 515F/806R primer pair (Caporaso et al., 2012) with a barcode on the forward primer. The following conditions were used for this amplification reaction: 94 C for 3 minutes, followed by 28 cycles of 94 C for 30 seconds, 53 C for 40 seconds, and 72 C for 1 minute, after which a final elongation step at 72 C for 5 minutes was performed. Following amplification, PCR products were verified on a 2% agarose gel. Samples were pooled together in equimolar concentrations and purified using calibrated Ampure XP beds. The pooled and purified PCR products were then used to construct an Illumina DNA library. Sequencing was performed at MR DNA (www.mrdnalab.com, Shallowater, TX, USA) on a MiSeq following the manufacturer s guidelines.