Aquatic Sciences Meeting, Albuquerque 2001

SS14 Microbial Diversity (Disciplinary Connections)

Date: Monday, February 12, 2001, Time: 11:45:00 AM

Location: Brazos

Kemp, P, F, SUNY-Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY, USA, kemp@ocean2.msrc.sunysb.edu

Aller, J, Y, SUNY-Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY, USA, jyaller@notes.cc.sunysb.edu

BACTERIAL COMMUNITY DIVERSITY AND INFERRED METABOLISM

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in the number of ribosomal RNA-based analyses of the diversity of largely uncultured bacterial communities from a wide variety of environments. We are interested in determining whether it is possible to infer the potential metabolic pathways in a bacterial community based on the sequences determined in an rRNA clone library. We examined published analyses of 83 rRNA-based clone libraries from 10-800 clones in size, and found that bacterial diversity is typically high, evenly distributed, and directly proportional to the size of the clone library, with a slope of 0.43 (i.e. 43 unique clones per 100 clones sequenced). There is no indication that larger libraries exhaustively sample total bacterial diversity. However, we hypothesize that environmental factors limit metabolic pathways more than rRNA sequence diversity, such that clone libraries have a greater chance of exhaustively sampling metabolic potential than of exhaustively sampling rRNA sequence diversity. We will present a case study of an inferred-metabolism analysis of a clone library for a tropical marine sediment bacterial community.

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Aquatic Sciences Meeting, Albuquerque 2001

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