Quantifying synthetic bacterial community composition with flow cytometry: efficacy in mock communities and challenges in co-cultures.

ABSTRACT: Determination of bacterial community composition in synthetic communities is critical for understanding microbial systems. The community composition is typically determined through bacterial plating or through PCR-based methods, which can be labor-intensive, expensive, or prone to bias. Simultaneously, flow cytometry has been suggested as a cheap and fast alternative. However, since the technique captures the phenotypic state of bacterial cells, accurate determination of community composition could be affected when bacteria are co-cultured. We investigated the performance of flow cytometry for quantifying oral synthetic communities and compared it to the performance of strain specific qPCR and 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing. Therefore, axenic cultures, mock communities and co-cultures o

SUBMITTER: Mermans F 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11748490 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature