title: Fungal amplicon sequencing from a soil column experiment of a sodic subsoil with plant and nutrient-rich amendment treatments
design: The treatments used in this soil column experiment involved a factorial combination of three amendments, two plant treatments ( wheat plants) and two harvest times (at stem elongation and at maturity). The three amendments were a control (zero amendments), wheat straw + fertilizer nutrients (straw-NPKS) and poultry litter + macracote (PL-mac). The preparation, nutrient concentration, and application of the amendments to the columns is as described previously (Wang et al., 2020).   Soil samples were collected from two locations within the column: at the amendment layer, where soil was collected 12 cm away from the amendment band and the wall of the PVC  column; and at the subsoil layer, at 34 cm distance below the amendment and collected as a central soil core.  Soil DNA was extracted using a Qiagen Power soil kit, Paired-end amplicon reads  were generated on the Illumina MisSeq platform (2 X 150bp) at The Ramaciotti Centre for Genomics, Sydney, NSW, Australia for the fungal ITS1 region using primers ITS1f (White et al., 1990) and ITS2 (Gardes and Bruns, 1993).