Accumulation of DNA in an anoxic sediment – rDNA and rRNA presence of members of the microbial community from Landsort Deep, the Baltic Sea

Abstract

Numerous investigations of bacterial communities using sequence analysis of environmental DNA have revealed extensive diversity of microbial taxa in an array of different environmental habitats. Community analysis based solely on DNA, however, does not reveal whether the detected community members are actively contributing to community functioning, or whether they are dormant or remnants of dead cells. This dilemma is of particular concern when analyzing microbial community structure of sites with a high degree of deposited matter, such as marine sediments. For example, the Baltic Sea's deepest point,

Microbial Community and Metabolic Activity in Thiocyanate Degrading Low Temperature Microbial Fuel Cells

“…8% of the trimmed reads were identified as 16S rRNA; 4% of the trimmed reads were identified as mRNA, of which 88% was assigned to a known protein in the InterPro database ( Supplementary File 5 ). Although using 16S rRNA data as a proxy for microbial activity has been questioned ( Blazewicz et al, 2013 ), here we use the 16S rRNA read counts to infer a ‘protein synthesis potential’ ( Thureborn et al, 2017 ). The dominant 16S rRNA reads (between 63 and 76%) were aligned to the Thiobacillus genus and primarily to T. denitrificans across the four samples ( Figure 2 ).…”