Australian Centre for Ecogenomics, School of Chemistry and Molecular Biosciences, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
ISME J. 2013 Aug;7(8):1661-4. doi: 10.1038/ismej.2013.47. Epub 2013 Mar 21.
Chemotaxis allows microorganisms to rapidly respond to different environmental stimuli; however, understanding of this process is limited by conventional assays, which typically focus on the response of single axenic cultures to given compounds. In this study, we used a modified capillary assay coupled with flow cytometry and 16S rRNA gene amplicon pyrosequencing to enumerate and identify populations within a lake water microbial community that exhibited chemotaxis towards ammonium, nitrate and phosphate. All compounds elicited chemotactic responses from populations within the lake water, with members of Sphingobacteriales exhibiting the strongest responses to nitrate and phosphate, and representatives of the Variovorax, Actinobacteria ACK-M1 and Methylophilaceae exhibiting the strongest responses to ammonium. Our results suggest that chemotaxis towards inorganic substrates may influence the rates of biogeochemical processes.
趋化作用使微生物能够快速响应不同的环境刺激；然而，由于传统的检测方法通常侧重于单一的无菌培养物对特定化合物的反应，因此对这一过程的理解受到限制。在这项研究中，我们使用改良的毛细管检测方法，结合流式细胞术和 16S rRNA 基因扩增子焦磷酸测序，对湖水中表现出对铵、硝酸盐和磷酸盐趋化作用的微生物群落中的种群进行计数和鉴定。所有化合物都引起了湖水中种群的趋化反应，鞘氨醇单胞菌目中的成员对硝酸盐和磷酸盐表现出最强的反应，而变形菌、放线菌 ACK-M1 和噬甲基菌科的代表对铵的反应最强。我们的结果表明，对无机底物的趋化作用可能会影响生物地球化学过程的速率。
