Subject area	Biology
More specific subject area	Ruminant Microbiology
Type of data	Figures
How data was acquired	Next-generation sequencing technologies - Illumina MiSeq and Pacific Biosciences RSII instrument
Data format	Analyzed
Experimental factors	Rumen content samples were obtained from a contemporary group of steers as outlined in [1]. DNA was extracted from rumen samples as described in [1].
Experimental features	DNA was extracted from rumen samples using a repeated bead beating plus column (RBB+C) method [2]. Isolated metagenomic DNA was sheared to 350bp (Covaris, Woburn, MA) and used to create TruSeq® PCR Free libraries for sequencing using the 2×150 NextSeq 500 high output kit and the Illumina NextSeq 500® sequencing platform (Illumina, San Diego, CA). The pooled PCR amplicon libraries were sequenced using the Pacific Biosciences RSII instrument.
Data source location	Clay Center, NE, USA
Data accessibility	Data is within this article and raw ruminal MiSeq sequence data is available from the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (SRA Accession SRP047292). Additional descriptive information is associated with NCBI BioProject PRJNA261425. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/bioproject/PRJNA261425/