A quantitative PMA-16S rRNA gene sequencing workflow for absolute abundance measurements of seawater microbial communities

Updated: 2025-12-09

This data collection consists of microbial count data from seawater microbiomes based on both flow cytometry and 16S rRNA copy numbers from droplet digital PCR (ddPCR) that were used to validate a framework for quantifying absolute abundance of microbial communities for use in downstream ecotoxicology modelling. Seawater was collected from the AIMS jetty (19°16′38.4”S, 147°03′32.1”E) and the relationship between cell counts and absolute 16S rRNA gene copy numbers was determined by preparing varying proportions of natural seawater and artificial seawater suspensions (natural seawater proportions of 100, 80, 60, 40, 20, and 0% of a total 500 mL sample, with ASW making up the remaining proportion). For full methodological details please refer to the full research publication, Thomas et al. 2025 (https://doi.org/10.1186/s40793-025-00741-2) its supplementary materials and the associated GitHub repository (GitHub - MarieCThomas/Quantitative-PMA-16S-rRNA-Gene-Sequencing-Workflow). Additionally, raw sequencing data can be found in the NCBI Sequence Read Archives under BioProject number PRJNA1176196.