Assembly of silk microbiota in Stegodyphus dumicola
Dataset contains samples collected from locations across southern Africa. At each location, three different sample types were collected: the nest and capture silk from African social spider (Stegodyphus dumicola) colonies and soil from underneath the nest. Bacterial and fungal metabarcoding were conducted using the V3-V4 regions of the 16S rRNA gene and ITS gene, respectively. The goal of the study was to focus on both local microbial dispersal between the silk and the soil as well as long-distance dispersal influencing silk microbial community assembly more broadly.