Shotgun metagenomic data of microbiomes on plastic fabrics exposed to harsh tropical environments

The development of more affordable high-throughput DNA sequencing technologies and powerful bioinformatics is making of shotgun metagenomics a common tool for effective characterization of microbiomes and robust functional genomics. A shotgun metagenomic approach was applied in the characterization of microbial communities associated with plasticized fabric materials exposed to a harsh tropical environment for 14 months. High-throughput sequencing of TruSeq paired-end libraries was conducted using a whole-genome shotgun (WGS) approach on an Illumina HiSeq2000 platform generating 100 bp reads. A multifaceted bioinformatics pipeline was developed and applied to conduct quality control and trimming of raw reads, microbial classification, assembly of multi-microbial genomes, binning of assembled contigs to individual genomes, and prediction of microbial genes and proteins. The bioinformatic analysis of the large 161 Gb sequence dataset generated 3,314,688 contigs and 120 microbial genomes. The raw metagenomic data and the detailed description of the bioinformatics pipeline applied in data analysis provide an important resource for the genomic characterization of microbial communities associated with biodegraded plastic fabric materials. The raw shotgun metagenomics sequence data of microbial communities on plastic fabric materials have been deposited in MG-RAST (https://www.mg-rast.org/) under accession numbers: mgm4794685.3–mgm4794690.3. The datasets and raw data presented here were associated with the main research work “Metagenomic characterization of microbial communities on plasticized fabric materials exposed to harsh tropical environments” (Radwan et al., 2020).