“…In the last several decades, the development of the culture-independent high throughput sequencing (HTS) approaches offered a technical alternative to solve, at least partially, the above problems (Hudson, 2008). HTS has expanded our knowledge of the genetic diversity and community composition of microbial eukaryotes in sediments of coastal oceans (Gong et al, 2015;Massana et al, 2015;Salonen et al, 2019), hydrothermal vents (Edgcomb et al, 2002;López-García et al, 2007;Brisbin et al, 2019;Murdock and Juniper, 2019), cold seep (Sauvadet et al, 2010;Pasulka et al, 2016), deep-sea (Bik et al, 2012;Wu and Huang, 2019), and anoxic environments (Dawson and Pace, 2002;Stoeck and Epstein, 2003;Takishita et al, 2005). Based on the limited amount of data collected so far, it has been proposed that marine sediments harbor huge, yet largely unknown diversity of microbial eukaryotic assemblages whose diversity may be comparable or even exceed that of the planktonic groups (Scheckenbach et al, 2010;Bik et al, 2012;Forster et al, 2016).…”