Bacterial distribution in the Equatorial Indian Ocean using Amplicon sequencing of V3-V4 rDNA hypervariable region data

The Equatorial Indian Ocean (EIO) is a complex system strongly influenced by Indian Monsoon. During a RAMA (Research Moored Array for African-Asian-Australian Mon-soon Analysis and Prediction) mooring maintenance expe-dition during the Southwest monsoon (August-September 2016) onboard ORV Sagar Kanya, seawater samples from the surface, deep chlorophyll maxima (DCM) and 200m were collected for bacterioplankton community structure. Herein we document our amplicon data of the bacterial commu-nity at 4 stations (4.01 degrees S, 1.60 degrees S, 0.36 degrees N and 1.78 degrees N) along the 67 degrees 00' E transect. The samples were subjected to next -generation sequencing (NGS), followed by processing with Mothur v 1.48.0, and the taxonomic classification prepared with Silva 138.1nr reference database. Our data indicates Al-phaproteobacteria (48 %) and Cyanobacteria (33 %) dominance in the surface and DCM samples.(c) 2022 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ )

Automated summary

In this study, we analyzed the bacterial community structure at different depths in the Equatorial Indian Ocean using DNA sequencing. Our results showed that Al-phaproteobacteria and Cyanobacteria were the dominant bacterial phyla in the surface and deep chlorophyll maxima samples.