Abstract
In this report, the high-throughput sequencing data of soil bacterial communities from indigenous and commercial forests in Tweefontein, South Africa are presented. These data were collected to study the influence of land-use change on soil bacterial diversity and community structure in forests. Illumina Miseq sequencing of 16S rRNA gene amplicon was carried out on soils sampled from Tweefontein commercial (TC) and indigenous (TI) forests in South Africa. The metagenome contained 101,938 sequences with 46,709,377 bp size and 57% G + C content in TI and 91,160 sequences with 41,707,827 bp size and 57% G + C content in TC. Metagenome sequence information are available at NCBI under the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) database with accession numbers SRR8134476 (TI) and SRR8135323 (TC). Taxonomic hits distribution from Metagenomic Rast Server (MG-RAST) analysis of the TI sample revealed the dominance of the phyla Acidobacteria (21.61%), Actinobacteria (18.23%) and Verrucomicrobia (16.78%). Predominant genera were Candidatus Koribacter (12.82%), Candidatus Solibacter (11.74%) and Chthoniobacter (9.36%). MG-RAST assisted analysis of TC sample also detected the dominance of Actinobacteria (23.62%) along with Verrucomicrobia (21.92%) and Acidobacteria (20.74%). Predominant genera were Chthoniobacter (24.94%), Candidatus Solibacter (16.74%) and Candidatus Koribacter (9.39%) which play vital ecological functions in forest ecosystems.