16S rRNA: negative control
DNA was extracted from the entire recruit for the small sized seven months old samples, and from a ~20 mg fragments collected from the coral branch tip for the adult and two years old juvenile samples. The extraction was conducted using a salting-out method with bead beating and additional enzymatic digestion steps with Lysozyme and Proteinase K. A tissue-free extraction was also conducted as a contamination control. The Primers 515fB [5?-TCGTCGGCAGCGTCAGATGTGTATAAGAGACAGGTGYCAGCMGCCGCGGTAA-3?] (Apprill, McNally, Parsons, & Weber, 2015) and 806rB [5?-GTCTCGTGGGCTCGGAGATGTGTATAAGAGACAGGGACTACNVGGGTWTCTAAT-3?] (Parada, Needham, & Fuhrman, 2016) with Illumina adapter sequences (underlined) (Illumina, San Diego, California, USA) added at the 5-prime ends were used to amplify the hypervariable V4 region of the bacterial 16S rRNA gene. Demultiplexed FASTQ files of all samples were processed in the same run and read quality was visualized using FastQC (Andrews, 2018). Conservative quality trimming was conducted using Trimmomatic and sequence reads were joined using PandaSeq (Masella, Bartram, Truszkowski, Brown, & Neufeld, 2012). Note that the files provided here are have already been through conservative quality trimming and the forward and reserved reads have been joined.