Bar-coded pyrosequencing reveals shared bacterial community properties along the temperature gradients of two alkaline hot springs in Yellowstone National Park.

ABSTRACT: An understanding of how communities are organized is a fundamental goal of ecology but one which has historically been elusive for microbial systems. We used a bar-coded pyrosequencing approach targeting the V3 region of the bacterial small-subunit rRNA gene to address the factors that structure communities along the thermal gradients of two alkaline hot springs in the Lower Geyser Basin of Yellowstone National Park. The filtered data set included a total of nearly 34,000 sequences from 39 environmental samples. Each was assigned to one of 391 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) identified by their unique V3 sequence signatures. Although the two hot springs differed in their OTU compositions, community resemblance and diversity changed with strikingly similar dynamics along the two outflow

SUBMITTER: Miller SR 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2704827 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Jul

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature