16S amplicon of marine bacteria
The extracted DNA was subjected to PCR using specific primers targeting the V3-V4 hyper variable regions of the 16S rRNA gene (S-DBact-0341-b-S-17: CCTACGGGNGGCWGCAG; S-D-Bact-0785-a-A-21: GACTACHVGGGTATCTAATCC) (Klindworth et al. 2013). These primers have been found to successfully amplify approximately 440 bp amplicons of all the major high-level bacterial taxonomic groups. The amplicon samples were sequenced on Illumina MiSeq using 300 + 300 bp paired-end chemistry which allows for overlap and stitching together of paired amplicon reads into one full-length read.