Structure of Microbial Communities Through 16S rRNA Analysis: cDNA and Hybridization Probe Methods

微生物生态学家不确定任何微生物群落的组成和结构，因为传统方法不能确保所有群落成员的识别。这为理解毒物和基因工程生物如何影响自然微生物群落提供了一个很差的基础。这个问题的新解决方案来自分子系统学和重组DNA技术的改进。16S rRNA是一种独特的细胞成分，可用于描述微生物群落。先前关于这一方法的工作导致了一种从自然群落中检索16S rRNA序列信息作为拷贝DNA的方法的拟议开发，其价值在于它允许对群落成员进行定量和定性分析。该方法的局限性和适用范围将以一个温泉蓝藻藻席群落为模型进行分析。

Microbial ecologists are unsure of the composition and structure of any microbial community, because traditional methods cannot ensure the recognition of all community members. This provides a poor basis for understanding how toxicants and genetically engineered organisms affect natural microbial communities. New solutions to this problem come from molecular phylogeny and improvements in recombinant-DNA technology. 16S rRNA is a unique cellular component useful for describing microbial communities. Prior work on this approach leads to the proposed development of a method for retrieving 16S rRNA sequence information from natural communities as copy DNA, valuable in that it permits quantitative as well as qualitative analysis of community members. The limitations and scope of the method will be analyzed on a hot spring cyanobacterial mat community as a model.