Project description:We characterized the bacterial diversity of chlorinated drinking water from three surface water treatment plants supplying the city of Paris, France. For this purpose, we used serial analysis of V6 ribosomal sequence tag (SARST-V6) to produce concatemers of PCR-amplified ribosomal sequence tags (RSTs) from the V6 hypervariable region of the 16S rRNA gene for sequence analysis. Using SARST-V6, we obtained bacterial profiles for each drinking water sample, demonstrating a strikingly high degree of biodiversity dominated by a large collection of low-abundance phylotypes. In all water samples, between 57.2-77.4% of the sequences obtained indicated bacteria belonging to the Proteobacteria phylum. Full-length 16S rDNA sequences were also generated for each sample, and comparison of the RSTs with these sequences confirmed the accurate assignment for several abundant bacterial phyla identified by SARST-V6 analysis, including members of unclassified bacteria, which account for 6.3-36.5% of all V6 sequences. These results suggest that these bacteria may correspond to a common group adapted to drinking water systems. The V6 primers used were subsequently evaluated with a computer algorithm to assess their hybridization efficiency. Potential errors associated with primer-template mismatches and their impacts on taxonomic group detection were investigated. The biodiversity present in all three drinking water samples suggests that the bacterial load of the drinking water leaving treatment plants may play an important role in determining the downstream community dynamics of water distribution networks. 3 different drinking water samples (Orly, Ivry, Joinville drinking water sample)
Project description:To effectively monitor microbial populations in acidic environments and bioleaching systems, a comprehensive 50-mer-based oligonucleotide microarray was developed based on most of the known genes associated with the acidophiles. This array contained 1,072 probes in which there were 571 related to 16S rRNA and 501 related to functional genes. Acid mine drainage (AMD) presents numerous problems to the aquatic life and surrounding ecosystems. However, little is known about the geographic distribution, diversity, composition, structure and function of AMD microbial communities. In this study, we analyzed the geographic distribution of AMD microbial communities from twenty sites using restriction fragment length polymorphism (RFLP) analysis of 16S rRNA genes, and the results showed that AMD microbial communities were geographically distributed and had high variations among different sites. Then an AMD-specific microarray was used to further analyze nine AMD microbial communities, and showed that those nine AMD microbial communities had high variations measured by the number of detected genes, overlapping genes between samples, unique genes, and diversity indices. Statistical analyses indicated that the concentrations of Fe, S, Ca, Mg, Zn, Cu and pH had strong impacts on both phylogenetic and functional diversity, composition, and structure of AMD microbial communities. This study provides insights into our understanding of the geographic distribution, diversity, composition, structure and functional potential of AMD microbial communities and key environmental factors shaping them. This study investigated the geographic distribution of Acid Mine Drainages microbial communities using a 16S rRNA gene-based RFLP method and the diversity, composition and structure of AMD microbial communities phylogenetically and functionally using an AMD-specific microarray which contained 1,072 probes ( 571 related to 16S rRNA and 501 related to functional genes). The functional genes in the microarray were involved in carbon metabolism (158), nitrogen metabolism (72), sulfur metabolism (39), iron metabolism (68), DNA replication and repair (97), metal-resistance (27), membrane-relate gene (16), transposon (13) and IST sequence (11).
Project description:This study aimed to model formamide-based melting for the optimization of the sensitivity and specifcity of oligonucleotide probes in dignostic high-density microarrays. Formamide melting profiles of DNA oligonucleotides were obtained with a high-density microarray targeting 16S rRNA genes of Escherichia coli and Rhodobacter sphaeroides. One or two mismatched versions of perfect match probes were included on the array to systematically analyze the effect of formamide on mismatch stability and mismatch discrimination. A thermodynamics-based mathematical model of formamide denaturation was developed to predict the formamide melting profiles with sufficient accuracy to help with oligonucleotide design in microbial ecology applications. 16S rRNA sequences with GenBank accession codes U00006 ( E. coli ) and X53853 (R. sphaeroides) were used for probe design. The following oligonucleotide probe sets were used for the systematic analysis of the effect of formamide on probe-target hybrids (parenthetic information gives set name followed by the number of probes): 22-mer perfect match probes tiling the 16S rRNA gene of E. coli (TileE, n=1521), perfect match E.coli probes of variable length between 18 and 26 mers (Length, n=1045), E. coli probes with central single mismatches (OneM, n=1563), E. coli probes with single positional mismatches (PosM, n=4092), E. coli probes with single deletion mismatches (Gap, n=248), E. coli probes with single insertion mismatches (Insertion, n=248), E. coli probes with two separate mismatches (TwoM, n=1674), E. coli probes with central tandem mismatches (Tandem, n=558), and 22-mer perfect match probes tiling the 16S rRNA gene of R. sphaeroides. Also, a probe with no match to 16S rRNA genes was used as a background control. On the array, regular probes were replicated three times and the Nonsense probe ten times. See the manuscript of Yilmaz et al. for details.