Methods for Analyzing Diversity of Microbial Communities in Natural Environments

Difficulties in cultivating most of the microorganisms limit our ability to study microbial ecosystems. Molecular methods are valuable tools for investigating the diversity and structure of bacterial communities. These techniques can be used on culturable as well as non-culturable bacteria. Cultivation independent techniques based on nucleic acids extracted from the environment provide information on community structure and diversity. Analyses of DNA can determine the numbers of different genomes. Ribosomal RNA (rRNA) or rDNA (genes coding for rRNA) fingerprinting, probing and sequencing can be used to detect and identify organisms. The combination of different methods that complement each other is a useful strategy for monitoring changes of microbial communities in natural ecosystems.