Ecological roles of dominant and rare prokaryotes in acid mine drainage revealed by metagenomics and metatranscriptomics.

ABSTRACT: High-throughput sequencing is expanding our knowledge of microbial diversity in the environment. Still, understanding the metabolic potentials and ecological roles of rare and uncultured microbes in natural communities remains a major challenge. To this end, we applied a 'divide and conquer' strategy that partitioned a massive metagenomic data set (>100 Gbp) into subsets based on K-mer frequency in sequence assembly to a low-diversity acid mine drainage (AMD) microbial community and, by integrating with an additional metatranscriptomic assembly, successfully obtained 11 draft genomes most of which represent yet uncultured and/or rare taxa (relative abundance <1%). We report the first genome of a naturally occurring Ferrovum population (relative abundance >90%) and its metabolic potentials

SUBMITTER: Hua ZS 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4438317 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature