Water samples were collected in Fram Strait during the Polarstern cruise PS85 (June 6th 2014 until July 3rd 2014) from eastern Greenland shelf to west coast of Spitsbergen. For assessing bacterial community composition 2 L of water were filtered with peristaltic pump through successive membrane filters of 3 m and 0.22 m. The extracted genomic bacterial DNA was isolated and the hypervariable V3-V4 (341F - 785R) region of the bacterial 16S rRNA was amplified and sequenced using Illumina MiSeq platform in a 2 300 bp paired-end run.