Microbial Communities and Diversity

Phospholipid fatty acid analysis (PLFA) is based on the determination of signature lipid biomarkers from the cell membranes and walls of microorganisms. Phospholipids are an essential part of intact cell membranes, and information from the lipid analysis provides quantitative insight into three important attributes of microbial communities viable biomass, community structure, and nutritional status. Phospholipid fatty acid prohles have been used to show the response of the microbial community to phosphorus availability (Keinanen et ah, 2002). Signature lipid biomarker analysis may not detect every species of microorganism in an environmental sample accurately, because many species have similar PLFA patterns. 

Availability of molecular approaches including DNA sequencing analysis has revolutionized the current understanding of microbial communities and ecology. 

Terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RELP) (Liu et al., 1997 Thies, 2007) is used for rapid analysis of microbial community diversity in various environments. The technique employs PCR in which one of the two primers used are fluorescently labeled and used to amplify a selected region of bacterial genes encoding 16S rRNA from total community DNA (Liu et al., 

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