Meeting Abstract
The Hawaiian Islands are home to the greatest concentration of anchialine (landlocked coastal pools of brackish water) habitats in the world, but little has been done to characterize the endemic microbial communities inhabiting them. To this end, water column and benthic samples were collected from nine anchialine habitats on three islands (Oahu, Maui and Hawaii) in Summer 2010. To elucidate general trends in microbial diversity and community structure, the prokaryotic-specific V6 and eukaryotic-biased V9 regions of small subunit (SSU) rRNA were amplified and resulting products sequenced using high-throughput microbiome profiling by Illumina sequencing. The dataset encompassed 19,806,349 demultiplexed Illumina V6 reads in each paired-end direction and 13,128,796 V9 reads. These grouped into 1,776 and 1,337 operational taxonomic units (OTUs), respectively, using the QIIME open reference OTU algorithm. Taxonomic identities were assigned using the GreenGenes 13.8 database for V6 reads and the Silva 111 database for V9 reads. Overall prokaryotic and eukaryotic diversity indices and community characteristics will be discussed.
