Sequencing marine seafloor samples
While marine seafloor covers 70 % of Earth's surface, the literature currently lacks comprehensive benchmarking of sequence variant resolution analytic tools used for metabarcoding high-diversity environmental samples. In this study, sequence variant tools (Dada2, Deblur, Swarm and UNOISE) were validated, using 30 sediment samples with three technical replicates each. Five common DNA extraction kits were used (Magpure soil, Magpure stool, Powersoil KF, Powersoil pro and Zymo Research QuickDNA), and a total of 450 DNA samples were sequenced using Illumina MiSeq.