Horizontal gene transfer to endogenous endophytic bacteria from poplar improves phytoremediation of toluene

Article Abstract:

Poplar is inoculated with the endophyte Burkholderia cepacia VN1468, whose natural host is yellow lupine, and with the soil isolate B. cepacia BU61, which expresses toluene degradation. This is the first report of in planta horizontal gene transfer among plant-associated endophytic bacteria and shows that such transfer can change natural endophytic microbial communities in order to improve the remediation of environmental insults.

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Advantage of using inosine at the 3' termini of 16S rRNA gene universal primers for the study of microbial diversity

Article Abstract:

The 3' termini of both 16S rRNA gene primers 8F and 907R are replaced with inosine to overcome their shortcomings when studying the diversity of complex microbial communities. A comparison of the clone libraries derived using both primer sets revealed seven bacterial phyla amplified by the altered primer set (8F-I/907R-I) whereas the original set amplified sequences belonging almost exclusively to Proteobacteria (95.8%).

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Use of single-point genome signature tags as a universal tagging method for microbial genome surveys

Article Abstract:

Genome signature tags (GSTs) were developed for use in a cost-effective sequencing-based method to identify and quantitatively analyze genomic or mixtures of genomic DNA. The method was successfully used to generate Csp6I-based tags upstream of the 16S rRNA gene and allowed to discriminate between closely related strains of Bacillus cereus and Bacillus anthracis.

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