The protocols in this collection are from the Alberti A., et al manuscript (Alberti A. 2017, Scientific Data). These protocols provide detailed procedures applied for genomic data generation, from nucleic acids extraction to sequence production, and we describe registries of genomics datasets available at the European Nucleotide Archive (ENA, www.ebi.ac.uk/ena). This collection complements other efforts to provide a full description of experiments and open science resources generated from the Tara Oceans project, further extending their value for the study of the world’s planktonic ecosystems.'From the Methods section:'The generation of information-rich data from marine plankton samples presents unique challenges that are inherent to the particular sampling conditions at sea and the wide spectrum of organisms included in that environment. All processing steps, including biomass collection, sample preservation, nucleic acids extractions and sequencing library preparation, are critical and require specific protocols and robust methods in order to ensure comparability of results and limit potential biases.Our methods were either developed specifically for Tara Oceans samples or carefully selected among existing ones in order to meet the requirements of our sequencing strategy and to produce optimized datasets for downstream bioinformatics analyses, as for example the production of overlapping reads from metagenomics libraries to facilitate assembly. They are presented in five sub-sections, starting with a brief description of how samples were handled between the research vessel and the processing laboratories (protocol 1). Protocol 2 reports on DNA and RNA extractions procedures for -omics analyses, including the generation of amplified genomic DNA from uncultured isolated unicellular eukaryotes. The generation of 18S and 16S rRNA amplicons from DNA of specific size-fractions is described in protocol 3 and Illumina libraries preparation in protocol 4. Sequencing procedures and post-sequencing data processing are described in protocol 5. For details on the onboard sampling protocols, see Pesant et al.'