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

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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.