Assessing Species Biomass Contributions in Microbial Communities Via Metaproteomics

Overview

Journal Nat Commun

Specialty Biology

Date 2017 Nov 18

PMID 29146960

Citations 117

Authors

Manuel Kleiner

Erin Thorson

Christine E Sharp

Xiaoli Dong

Dan Liu

Carmen Li

Marc Strous

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Microbial community structure can be analyzed by quantifying cell numbers or by quantifying biomass for individual populations. Methods for quantifying cell numbers are already available (e.g., fluorescence in situ hybridization, 16-S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing), yet high-throughput methods for assessing community structure in terms of biomass are lacking. Here we present metaproteomics-based methods for assessing microbial community structure using protein abundance as a measure for biomass contributions of individual populations. We optimize the accuracy and sensitivity of the method using artificially assembled microbial communities and show that it is less prone to some of the biases found in sequencing-based methods. We apply the method to communities from two different environments, microbial mats from two alkaline soda lakes, and saliva from multiple individuals. We show that assessment of species biomass contributions adds an important dimension to the analysis of microbial community structure.

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