quinoline-degrading biofilm microbial community
denitrifying quinoline-degrading bacterial community structure analyzed by pyrosequencing
Zhang X,Yue S, Zhong H, Hua W, Chen R, Cao Y,  and Zhao L. A diverse bacterial community in an anoxic quinoline-degrading bioreactor determined by using pyrosequencing and clone library analysis. Applied Microbial and Biotechnology, 2011, 91:425–434.
There is a concern of whether the structure and  diversity of a microbial community can be effectively  revealed by short-length pyrosequencing reads. In this  study, we performed a microbial community analysis on a  sample from a high-efficiency denitrifying quinolinedegrading  bioreactor and compared the results generated  by pyrosequencing with those generated by clone library  technology. By both technologies, 16S rRNA gene analysis  indicated that the bacteria in the sample were closely related  to, for example, Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, and Bacteroidetes.  The sequences belonging to Rhodococcus were the  most predominant, and Pseudomonas, Sphingomonas,  Acidovorax, and Zoogloea were also abundant. Both  methods revealed a similar overall bacterial community  structure. However, the 622 pyrosequencing reads of the  hypervariable V3 region of the 16S rRNA gene revealed  much higher bacterial diversity than the 130 sequences  from the full-length 16S rRNA gene clone library. The 92  operational taxonomic unit (OTUs) detected using pyrosequencing  belonged to 45 families, whereas the 37 OTUs  found in the clone library belonged to 25 families. Most  sequences obtained from the clone library had equivalents  in the pyrosequencing reads. However, 64 OTUs detected  by pyrosequencing were not represented in the clone library. Our results demonstrate that pyrosequencing of  the V3 region of the 16S rRNA gene is not only a powerful  tool for discovering low-abundance bacterial populations  but is also reliable for dissecting the bacterial community  structure in a wastewater environment.