RELATIONSHIP OF COMMUNITY COMPLEXITY AND MOLECULAR FUNCTION IN HIGHLY COMPLEX ACTIVATED SLUDGE MICROBIAL COMMUNITY

Abstract

In the study of Microbial Ecology, individuals of a given community work to harvest energy and essential nutrients essential for upkeep of microbial communities. Metabolic cooperation is thought of as composite metabolic pathways, metapathways, across members in microbial communities. One consequence is genes encoding the relevant enzymes in a given metapathway are derived from multiple genomes. To study metapathways, we mined for gene presence and expression using shotgun DNA, RNA sequencing. We have developed a method, Protein guided Assembly where reads are binned into known well-annotated gene families using KEGG Orthologs and later assembled. We simulated in silico, a shotgun sequencing dataset using 400 genomes based on a real wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) community. This data was used to score the method and we were able to recover 90% of genes. A reproducible framework for mapping and storing DNA and RNA read fragments to identify active metapathways is included.