“…Until now, most metabarcoding studies of plankton diversity has been assessed using primer pairs that produce fragments lengths <600 bp. For autotropic protists, the 16S plastidal V4‐V5 region was used (Needham & Fuhrman, 2016 ), while short reads of nuclear DNA were used for bacteria, archaea, protist and metazoans (Baehren et al., 2023 ; Curry et al., 2022 ; Davidov et al., 2020 ; Lentendu et al., 2022 ). A short fragment of the ribulose‐1,5‐bisphosphate carboxylase/oxygenase (rbcl) gene was recommended for freshwater diatom diversity (Pérez‐Burillo et al., 2020 ; Vasselon et al., 2017 ).…”