Bioreactor enrichments from intertidal sediment Metagenome

The oxidation of organic matter by a consortium of fermentative and sulfate reducing bacteria was investigated. Microbial biomass extracted from the upper 2 cm of a marine intertidal flat in the German Wadden Sea was enriched in long term continuous culture incubations supplied with monomers of decaying biomass in a marine medium, to observe what type of consortia would spontaneously assemble from a tidal flat sediment inoculum. Two enrichment cultures were obtained by continuous cultivation, and analyzed by chemical analysis, Fluorescence In Situ Hybridization (FISH) and metagenomics (binning of assembled contigs from 454 sequencing reads). Three bins were obtained from both the culture-1 and the culture-2 metagenomes, and assigned to uncultured Clostridia and a Desulfovibrio population. In Culture-2 a fourth bin was assigned to Desulfobacter.