ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We acknowledge the funding received by G.U. for this study from the Department of Biotechnology (DBT), Govt. of India, vide grant no. BT/PR29032/FCB/125/4/2018. S.M. was supported by a DBT-BINC PhD fellowship from the Govt. of India and an Early Career Grant from the National Geographic Society vide grant no. EC-53199T-18. We are grateful to Dr. Gurdeep Rastogi of the Chilika Development Authority for facilitating the sample collection and for his support throughout the project. We thank Manisha Ray, Divyasree Karne, Madhusmita Mohapatra, and Gopi Krishnan for their help during the sampling expeditions and DNA extraction. We also thank Tulasi Nagabandi of the CCMB NGS facility for her help with the preparation of libraries and sequencing.

DATA AVAILABILITY

All the raw sequencing data generated in this study has been submitted to NCBI SRA under the BioProject accession PRJNA691704. The SRA run accessions for all the samples are provided in Supplementary Table 1. The data will be released publicly immediately after acceptance. The Snakemake pipeline and R scripts used for analysis are available at https://github.com/manu-script/TaxDivToL.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

S.M. and G.U. conceived the idea and designed the study. S.M. collected the samples, generated the data, and analyzed the data. S.M. drafted the manuscript and G.U. edited the final manuscript.

COMPETING INTERESTS

The authors declare no competing interest.