Shotgun and Hi-C Sequencing Datasets for Binning Wheat Rhizosphere Microbiome

Abstract Binning is a crucial process in metagenomics studies, where sequenced reads are combined to form longer contigs and assigned to individual genomes. Conventional methods, such as shotgun binning, rely on similarity measurements and abundance profiles across multiple samples. However, cost constraints for sequencing and limited sample collection capacity hinder their effectiveness. High-throughput chromosome conformation capture (Hi-C), a DNA proximity ligation technique, has been adapted to accurately bin metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) from a single sample, addressing challenges like chimeric MAGs. In this study, we generated over 190 Gb of metagenomic data from wheat rhizospheres grown in two highly calcareous soils of South Australian region and compared conventional and Hi-C binning methods. Two shotgun metagenomes and Hi-C libraries were generated, assembling 1089 shotgun MAGs across 39 bacterial and one archaeal taxon, including 94 Hi-C based bins. Binning performed using only short read sequences was prone to high contamination, while the addition of Hi-C binning improved MAG quality and identified mobile element-host-infection interaction. This dataset provides important tools for studying microbial communities in wheat rhizosphere soils.