Assessing the Unseen Bacterial Diversity in Microbial Communities.

ABSTRACT: For both historical and technical reasons, 16S ribosomal RNA has been the most common molecular marker used to analyze the contents of microbial communities. However, its slow rate of evolution hinders the resolution of closely related bacteria--individual 16S-phylotypes, particularly when clustered at 97% sequence identity, conceal vast amounts of species- and strain-level variation. Protein-coding genes, which evolve more quickly, are useful for differentiating among more recently diverged lineages, but their application is complicated by difficulties in designing low-redundancy primers that amplify homologous regions from distantly related taxa. Given the now-common practice of multiplexing hundreds of samples, adopting new genes usually entails the synthesis of large sets of barcoded p

SUBMITTER: Caro-Quintero A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4700968 | biostudies-literature | 2015 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature