Bacterial Diversity in the Uranium Mill-Tailings Gittersee as Estimated via a 16S rDNA Approach

Bacterial diversity in a soil sample collected from a uranium mill-tailings called Gittersee and situated near the city of Dresden, Germany, was analysed by using a culture-independent 16S rDNA approach exploiting PCR amplification primers 7F and 1513R. The results were compared with those obtained earlier analysing the same sample by using another primer pair, namely 43F-1404R (Selenska-Pobell et al., 2002). The two 16S rDNA approaches demonstrated that Proteobacteria were the most predominant group in the sample, followed by Citophaga/Flavobacterium/ Bacteroides and by Gram positive bacteria with low and also with high G+C content. Moreover, a large number of the 16S rDNA sequences from the two libraries were identical or almost identical. However, the ratio between the bacterial groups represented in them differed significantly.
The 7F-1513R primer set retrieved in addition to the above mentioned 16S rDNA sequences also such of green non-sulfur bacteria and sequences of representatives of the AD1 and the OP11 divisions. The latter indicates that the 7F-1513R primer set seems to be more reliable in analyses of bacterial diversity.