title: Freshwater plankton (5 - 0.2 um) metatranscriptome
design: RNA was extracted from the 142 mm filters in ZR RNA Buffer (Zymo Research) and subject to bead beating for 2 min. The homogenate was processed through the ZR RNA Mini Isolation Kit. After extraction, RNA was depleted of contaminating DNA using the DNA-free RNA Kit (Zymo Research), and treated with Terminator Exonuclease (Epicentre) to increase the ratio of mRNA relative to rRNA. Following treatment, samples were amplified using the TransPlex kit (Sigma Aldrich).