Current molecular biologic techniques for characterizing environmental microbial community

Abstract

Microbes are vital to the earth because of their enormous numbers and instinct function maintaining the natural balance. Since the microbiology was applied in environmental science and engineering more than a century ago, researchers desire for more and more information concerning the microbial spatio-temporal variations in almost every fields from contaminated soil to wastewater treatment plant (WWTP). For the past 30 years, molecular biologic techniques explored for environmental microbial community (EMC) have spanned a broad range of approaches to facilitate the researches with the assistance of computer science: faster, more accurate and more sensitive. In this feature article, we outlined several current and emerging molecular biologic techniques applied in detection of EMC, and presented and assessed in detail the application of three promising tools.

Keywords

molecular biological technique / microbial community / denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) / terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) / environmental applications

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported by the Research Fund for the Doctoral Program of Higher Education, Ministry of Education of China (No. 20092302110059), and Heilongjiang Natural Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scientists (No. JC200909), and State Key Laboratory of Urban Water Resource and Environment (Harbin Institute of Technology) (Nos. 2010DX04, QAK201016). We also thank some students (Yuan Fu, Zhidan WEN, Xiaoli HUANG, Chunhong CHEN, Zhe LI, Qi ZHANG) for the materials collection.

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2014 Higher Education Press and Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg