title: Metagenome of benthic marine protists: sediments from the Azores islands
design: Sediment samples were pre-washed with three washing solutions to improve the success of DNA amplification by PCR. DNA was extracted using the Dneasy Power Lyzer Power Soil DNA isolation Kit (Qiagen). The hypervariable V9-region on the 18S rDNA was amplified using the primer-pair 1389F and 1510R (Amaral-Zettler et al., 2009).