RNA metabarcoding to assess zooplankton community response to environmental influence in boreal lake experimental enclosures

Abstract

Zooplankton metabarcoding can provide a high-throughput method for characterizing community response to environmental stressors. There are issues, however, with inferring actual response to stressors using DNA metabarcoding as it cannot distinguish alive organisms within bulk samples. Here we used normalized vitality, namely RNA metabarcoding normalized by DNA metabarcoding, to characterize the zooplankton community response to environmental influence. DNA and RNA metabarcoding was also applied in the context of assessing response of the zooplankton community exposed to simulated spills of diluted bitumen (dilbit), with experimental remediation practices of enhanced monitored natural recovery and shoreline cleaner application. Zooplankton samples were collected via pump on days -3 and 11 and 38 days after the simulated dilbit spill. The zooplankton samples were co-extracted for DNA and RNA and were PCR amplified targeting the mitochondrial Cytochrome c Oxidase subunit I gene (CO1) region, with amplicon sequencing following. The dataset includes the demultiplexed sequencing output, the feature table with species-level taxonomic annotation, and the sample metadata. This dataset contains data from enclosures in rock and cobble substrate. Note that a similar study was conducted for wetland habitat enclosures, with different analyses and interpretation being conducted on the data (dataset available at https://doi.org/10.20383/101.0313).