Exam 19: Taking the Measure of Microbial Systems

What are the pros and cons of traditional enrichment culture techniques? What advances in the last decade are improving enrichment culture techniques to aid the cultivation of uncultured microorganisms?

Genomic analysis of Prochlorococcus has revealed

Metaproteomics is a more developed field than metatranscriptomics due to the high sensitivity of mass spectrometry.

By using simple microscopy techniques, it is possible to determine if a pure culture is contaminated with another organism.

Enrichment cultures can be established by placing the inoculum into selective media and incubating under specific conditions.

Which of the following hypotheses could be tested using microautoradiography fluorescence in situ hybridization (MAR-FISH)?

You would like to test the hypothesis that ammonia-oxidizing Archaea are more active and abundant than ammonia-oxidizing Bacteria in coastal marine water. What technique(s) or experiment(s) could you use to test this hypothesis?

Laser tweezers are most directly used for

The science of microbial ecology deals with

A study of the human gut performed in 1982 used various types of plates under different growth conditions to describe and enumerate the microbes in the human gut. They concluded that the majority of the microbes in the human gut are Gammaproteobacteria. A study conducted in 2010 using next-generation sequencing to characterize 16S rRNA sequences concluded that the majority of the microbes in the human gut are Firmicutes and Bacteriodetes. Why did these studies have different conclusions? Which study do you think is most accurate?

FISH technology can employ only a single phylogenetic probe.

Metatranscriptomics and metaproteomics are favored over metagenomics when ________ is of more interest than ________.

The term axenic is used to describe a(n)

The diversity of microorganisms in culture collections is representative of the diversity of microorganisms found in nature.

Radioisotopes are useful when

How do viability stains usually distinguish between living cells and dead cells?

What prior knowledge is required to use a phylochip to study the abundance of the different microbes present within a microbial community? How does this cause bias when using a phylochip to analyze microbial community structure?

Phylogenetic stains, such as those used in phylogenetic FISH, hybridize with

For microbial biodiversity studies, it is common to identify the ________ rather than the ________ as a measure of biodiversity.

Propose a set of procedures or steps to sequence an individual cellʹs genome present in lake water.