Morris Cindy E, Bardin Marc, Berge Odile, Frey-Klett Pascale, Fromin Nathalie, Girardin Hélène, Guinebretière Marie-Hélène, Lebaron Philippe, Thiéry Jean M, Troussellier Marc
Station de Pathologie Végétale, Station de Technologie de Produits Végétaux, France.
Microbiol Mol Biol Rev. 2002 Dec;66(4):592-616, table of contents. doi: 10.1128/MMBR.66.4.592-616.2002.
Research interest in microbial biodiversity over the past 25 years has increased markedly as microbiologists have become interested in the significance of biodiversity for ecological processes and as the industrial, medical, and agricultural applications of this diversity have evolved. One major challenge for studies of microbial habitats is how to account for the diversity of extremely large and heterogeneous populations with samples that represent only a very small fraction of these populations. This review presents an analysis of the way in which the field of microbial biodiversity has exploited sampling, experimental design, and the process of hypothesis testing to meet this challenge. This review is based on a systematic analysis of 753 publications randomly sampled from the primary scientific literature from 1975 to 1999 concerning the microbial biodiversity of eight habitats related to water, soil, plants, and food. These publications illustrate a dominant and growing interest in questions concerning the effect of specific environmental factors on microbial biodiversity, the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of this biodiversity, and quantitative measures of population structure for most of the habitats covered here. Nevertheless, our analysis reveals that descriptions of sampling strategies or other information concerning the representativeness of the sample are often missing from publications, that there is very limited use of statistical tests of hypotheses, and that only a very few publications report the results of multiple independent tests of hypotheses. Examples are cited of different approaches and constraints to experimental design and hypothesis testing in studies of microbial biodiversity. To prompt a more rigorous approach to unambiguous evaluation of the impact of microbial biodiversity on ecological processes, we present guidelines for reporting information about experimental design, sampling strategies, and analyses of results in publications concerning microbial biodiversity.
在过去25年里，随着微生物学家对生物多样性在生态过程中的重要性产生兴趣，以及这种多样性在工业、医学和农业领域的应用不断发展，对微生物生物多样性的研究兴趣显著增加。微生物栖息地研究面临的一个主要挑战是，如何用仅代表这些种群极小部分的样本，来解释极其庞大且异质的种群的多样性。本综述分析了微生物生物多样性领域利用采样、实验设计和假设检验过程来应对这一挑战的方式。本综述基于对1975年至1999年从主要科学文献中随机抽取的753篇出版物的系统分析，这些文献涉及与水、土壤、植物和食物相关的八个栖息地的微生物生物多样性。这些出版物表明，对于特定环境因素对微生物生物多样性的影响、这种生物多样性的时空异质性以及此处涵盖的大多数栖息地的种群结构定量测量等问题，人们的兴趣占主导且不断增长。然而，我们的分析表明，出版物中常常缺少对采样策略或其他有关样本代表性信息的描述，对假设的统计检验使用非常有限，而且只有极少数出版物报告了对假设进行多次独立检验的结果。文中列举了微生物生物多样性研究中实验设计和假设检验的不同方法及限制的例子。为促使人们采用更严谨的方法来明确评估微生物生物多样性对生态过程的影响，我们提出了在有关微生物生物多样性的出版物中报告实验设计、采样策略和结果分析信息的指导原则。
