Active and dried moonmilk microbial communities from Montmilchpalast cave, south Germany
This project generated the first metagenomic datasets for active and dried moonmilk (a secondary karstic cave formation). The Montmilchpalast cave in south Germany was sampled in July 2022. Moonmilk samples were immediately frozen in dry ice and preserved as such until DNA extraction at Duisburg-Essen University. DNA was extracted from 1g of sample using the DNeasy PowerMax Soil Kit and sent for Illumina short-read sequencing. Short reads were quality-controlled, assembled using metaSPAdes, binned using metabat2 and MaxBin2, aggregated and dereplicated using DAS_Tool and manually refined using uBin. The resulting high-quality MAGs were analysed using a range of bioinformatics tools of relevance to realise the ecological, biogeochemical and biotechnological potential of moonmilk microbial communities.