The Choice of PCR Primers Has Great Impact on Assessments of Bacterial Community Diversity and Dynamics in a Wastewater Treatment Plant
Artikel i vetenskaplig tidskrift, 2013

Assessments of bacterial community diversity and dynamics are fundamental for the understanding of microbial ecology as well as biotechnological applications. We show that the choice of PCR primers has great impact on the results of analyses of diversity and dynamics using gene libraries and DNA fingerprinting. Two universal primer pairs targeting the 16S rRNA gene, 27F&1492R and 63F&M1387R, were compared and evaluated by analyzing the bacterial community in the activated sludge of a large-scale wastewater treatment plant. The two primer pairs targeted distinct parts of the bacterial community, none encompassing the other, both with similar richness. Had only one primer pair been used, very different conclusions had been drawn regarding dominant phylogenetic and putative functional groups. With 27F&1492R, Betaproteobacteria would have been determined to be the dominating taxa while 63F&M1387R would have described Alphaproteobacteria as the most common taxa. Microscopy and fluorescence in situ hybridization analysis showed that both Alphaproteobacteria and Betaproteobacteria were abundant in the activated sludge, confirming that the two primer pairs target two different fractions of the bacterial community. Furthermore, terminal restriction fragment polymorphism analyses of a series of four activated sludge samples showed that the two primer pairs would have resulted in different conclusions about community stability and the factors contributing to changes in community composition. In conclusion, different PCR primer pairs, although considered universal, target different ranges of bacteria and will thus show the diversity and dynamics of different fractions of the bacterial community in the analyzed sample. We also show that while a database search can serve as an indicator of how universal a primer pair is, an experimental assessment is necessary to evaluate the suitability for a specific environmental sample.

DNA sequences

Ribosomal RNA

Sequence databases

Sludge

Sequence analysis

Sequence alignment

Database searching

Författare

Johan Fredriksson

Chalmers, Bygg- och miljöteknik, Vatten Miljö Teknik

Britt-Marie Wilen

Chalmers, Bygg- och miljöteknik, Vatten Miljö Teknik

Malte Hermansson

Göteborgs universitet

PLoS ONE

1932-6203 (ISSN) 19326203 (eISSN)

Vol. 8 10 artikel nr e76431- e76431

Ämneskategorier

Biologiska vetenskaper

DOI

10.1371/journal.pone.0076431

Mer information

Skapat

2017-10-07