Protist diversity revealed by metabarcoding in Kongsfjorden, Svalbard mesocosm experiment

As a part of the MicroPolar project a mesocosm experiment was conducted in Kongsfjorden, Svalbard in July 2015. The aim was to assess the effect of grazing pressure and levels of organic carbon on the microbial composition and relative abundance over time. In this part of the project we studied how the protist community composition and relative abundance were affected by these two factors. Water samples (2L) were harvested 5 times during a 10 days incubation, and DNA from the size fractions 0.2-3 and 3-50 µm were PCR amplified by eukaryote general V4 18 rRNA gene primers and tag sequenced by Illumina. Both composition and relative abundance differed significantly in response to the two factors.