Analysis of Microbial Community Structure Using 16S rRNA- Based Methods

微生物生态学家不确定微生物群落的组成，传统的微生物群落培养方法不能确保所有群落成员的认可。这限制了人们对毒物和基因工程生物如何影响自然微生物群落的理解。最近，用于分析特定细胞成分16S核糖体RNA的新的分子方法的开发完成，作为一种在没有传统培养技术的情况下识别自然微生物群落的各种居民的手段。使用这些方法的初步结果表明，自然群落中确实有许多以前在微生物研究中没有注意到的居民。本提案将通过对先前获得的微生物垫的16S rRNA序列进行深入比较分析，确定模型温泉蓝藻垫的组成和结构。这应该揭示出真正的社区复杂性和纯文化集合所描述的部分之间的差异的大小。这个模型被充分研究的性质也将被用来研究群落的营养结构，以及可能存在的限制使用基于16S rRNA的杂交探针的所有rRNA方法的应用的问题。

Microbial ecologist are unsure of the composition and Traditional culture dependent methods for microbial communities cannot ensure the recognition of all community members. This limits understanding of how toxicants and genetically engineered organisms affect natural microbial communities. Recently the development of new molecular methods for analyzing a specific cellualr component, 16S ribosomal RNA, was completed as a means of identifying the various inhabitants of natural microbial communities without traditional culture techniques. The initial results using these methods demonstrate that natural communities do contain many inhabitants which were previously not noted in microbial studies. The composition and structure of a model hot spring cyanobacterial mat community will be determined in this proposal through in depth comparative analysis of 16S rRNA sequences previously obtained for the microbial mat. This should reveal the magnitude of the differences between real community complexity and that portion described by the pure culture collection. The well-studied nature of this model will also be explpoited to investigate the trophic structure of the community, as well as possible problems limiting the application of all rRNA methods usng 16S rRNA-based hybridization probes.