环境微生物群落结构与功能多样性研究方法

微生物群落的结构及群落内种间相互作用是影响其生态功能的决定性因素。尽管微生物群落是地球生物化学循环的主要驱动者,但是由于传统的微生物培养方法只能分离约1%10%的环境微生物,对复杂的环境微生物群落结构和功能多样性了解甚少。元基因组学、单细胞分析和群落遗传学等方法的出现,及其与微生物学的交叉融合,使得人们能够从微生物群落组成、物种功能、种间相互作用和预测模型等方面分析微生物群落。重点综述了元基因组学、单细胞分析和群落遗传学等方法及其在环境微生物群落结构和功能多样性中的应用进展。

Current progress in approaches to the study of structure and function diversities of environmental microbial communities

Microbial community structure and interspecies interactions are the key factors that determine the function of the community. Although these communities are the major drivers of many biosphere processes, due to the fact that only 1%-10% of natural microbes could be recovered by classical culture-dependent methods, relatively little is known about their structure and function. Some recently emerged novel methods, e.g. metagenomics, single cell analysis and community genetics enable researcher could decipher the ecological properties of microbial communities on the basis of the questions being asked: the composition of the community, the function of individual species, the model of interspecies interaction and predictive modeling at the community level. In the present review, we describe the current concept and application of metagenomics, single cell analysis and community genetics to study microbial ecology and progress toward predictive modeling.