Metatranscriptome of offshore surface Lake Michigan microbial community from control mesocosms after 19 hours incubation
Nearshore surface, offshore surface and offshore deep (hypolimnetic) Lake Michigan water was collected in September 2015 and used to set up ~3 L triplicate mesocosms that either received 120 micromolar terrestrially-derived dissolved organic matter (tDOM) or were left unamended (control). The mesocosms were incubated in the dark and subsampled for ~1 L water at 2 h and 19 h to collect free-living prokaryotic cells. These cells were then used for whole-community DNA and RNA extraction using phenol-chloroform based organic extraction in the lab. For this library, total RNA from the triplicate control mesocosms (19 h time-point) set up using offshore surface lake-water was pooled and used for metatranscriptomic sequencing. Briefly, the pooled total RNA was first enriched for mRNA by ribosomal RNA depletion using Illumina's Ribo-Zero bacteria kit, and the enriched mRNA was subsequently used for cDNA synthesis and library prep using Takara Bio's SMARTer Stranded RNA-Seq kit.