ABSTRACT

Over 109 bacteria cells can be detected in a single gram of soil (Travers et al. 1987). This phenomenal abundance and biodiversity presents challenges to understanding soil microbial community structure and function, as the majority of environmental microbes cannot be cultured in the laboratory (Torsvik et al. 1990). Microbial metagenomics, the isolation of whole genomic DNA and subsequent clone library screening (Handelsman et al. 1998), and next-generation sequencing technologies (Sundquist et al. 2007) are current methods used by ecologists to establish differences between microbial communities (Daniel 2005; Kakirde et al. 2010) in a culture-independent manner.