RNA-based amplicon sequencing is ineffective in measuring metabolic activity in environmental microbial communities.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Characterization of microbial activity is essential to the understanding of the basic biology of microbial communities, as the function of a microbiome is defined by its biochemically active ("viable") community members. Current sequence-based technologies can rarely differentiate microbial activity, due to their inability to distinguish live and dead sourced DNA. As a result, our understanding of microbial community structures and the potential mechanisms of transmission between humans and our surrounding environments remains incomplete. As a potential solution, 16S rRNA transcript-based amplicon sequencing (16S-RNA-seq) has been proposed as a reliable methodology to characterize the active components of a microbiome, but its efficacy has not been evaluated systematical

SUBMITTER: Wang Y 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10262425 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature