Measuring soil microbial community diversity using polar lipid fatty acid and denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis data

The possibility of calculating useful microbial community diversity indices from environmental polar lipid fatty acid and 16S rDNA PCR-DGGE data was i nvestigated. First, the behavior of the species richness, Shannon's, and Si mpson's diversity indices were determined on polar lipid fatty acid profile s of 115 pure cultures, communities constructed from those profiles with di fferent numbers of species, and constructed communities with different dist ributions of species. Differences in the species richness of these artifici al communities was detected by all three diversity indices, but they were i nsensitive to the evenness of the distribution of species. Second, data fro m a field experiment with substrate addition to soil was used to compare th e methods developed for lipid- and DNA-based diversity indices. Very good a greement was found between indices calculated from environmental polar lipi d fatty acid profiles and denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis profiles from matched samples (Pearson's correlation coefficient r=0.95-0.96). A met hod for data pre-treatment for diversity calculations is described. (C) 200 0 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.