Rm. Lehman et al., COMBINED MICROBIAL COMMUNITY-LEVEL ANALYSES FOR QUALITY ASSURANCE OF TERRESTRIAL SUBSURFACE CORES, Journal of microbiological methods, 22(3), 1995, pp. 263-281
Bacterial communities from surface soils, groundwater, drilling muds a
nd deep subsurface cores were profiled by sole carbon source utilizati
on and by phospholipid ester-linked fatty acid analysis. The combinati
on of these functional and structural methods successfully distinguish
ed communities from disparate origins. Multivariate analysis of the da
ta showed good agreement between the results of the two methods. Subsu
rface communities tended to respire amino acids over carbohydrates and
demonstrated preferential use of individual compounds such as acetate
and Tween as sole carbon sources. PLFA profiles indicated that the gr
oundwaters predominately contained gram negative aerobic heterotrophic
populations, the drilling muds and cuttings were populated by gram ne
gative anaerobes and the core communities were composed of anaerobic g
ram negative bacteria and gram positive bacteria. The utility of this
approach as a component of quality assurance of core samples obtained
for microbiological analysis during mud rotary coring was demonstrated
. Monitoring of controlled bioprocesses, environmental remediation and
detection of environmental disturbance are some of the numerous poten
tial applications for these community-level characterization methods.
Since combined analyses such as these can simultaneously provide speci
fic information about individual community members and about community
-level function, it is hoped that these methods will prove useful in a
nswering fundamental questions in microbial ecology, such as the relat
ionship between in situ community structure and its measurable functio
n.