RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Assessing species biomass contributions in microbial communities via metaproteomics
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 130575
DO 10.1101/130575
A1 Manuel Kleiner
A1 Erin Thorson
A1 Christine E. Sharp
A1 Xiaoli Dong
A1 Dan Liu
A1 Carmen Li
A1 Marc Strous
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/04/25/130575.abstract
AB Assessment of microbial community composition is the cornerstone of microbial ecology. Microbial community composition can be analyzed by quantifying cell numbers or by quantifying biomass for individual populations. However, as cell volumes can differ by orders of magnitude, these two approaches yield vastly different results. Methods for quantifying cell numbers are already available (e.g. fluorescence in situ hybridization, 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing), yet methods for assessing community composition in terms of biomass are lacking.We developed metaproteomics based methods for assessing microbial community composition using protein abundance as a measure for biomass contributions of individual populations. We optimized the accuracy and sensitivity of the method using artificially assembled microbial communities and found that it is less prone to some of the biases found in sequencing-based methods. We applied the method using communities from two different environments, microbial mats from two alkaline soda lakes and saliva from multiple individuals.