Prokaryotic Community Profile in a Wetland Ecosystem

The wetlands are natural ecosystems and essential part of the biosphere, through their beneficial functions helps in the mitigation of global climate change. The complexity of such ecosystems is contributed by the resident microbiome along with other flora, fauna and parameters like soil and water characteristics. Since microbes play the key role in biogeochemical cycles, the knowledge on their diversity is very essential. The culture dependent methods reveal only a minor fraction of the community since many of the microbes are recalcitrant to cultivation. In the study we have adopted the culture independent metagenomic approach to determine the prokaryote diversity, which encompasses 16S rRNA gene library construction, library sequencing and phylogenetic analysis. Out of the 600 clones generated 20 clones (bacteria) and 9 clones (archaea) were selected by Restriction Fragment length Polymorphism (RFLP) analysis and sequenced. The sequence analysis revealed that majority of the bacterial community belonged to the phylum Proteobacteria (45%), followed by Acidobacteria (25%), Firmicutes (15%), Verrucomicrobia (5%), Chloroflexi (5%) and Planctomycetes (5%). The archaeal sequences are distributed among the two phyla Euryarchaeota and Crenarchaeota.