Microbial diversity analysis of water samples from various hydrocarbon resource environments using next-generation 16S pyrosequencing

Investigations of the microbial communities present in oil and gas reserves have traditionally relied on culture based techniques. Traditional culture based approaches to environmental microbiology can miss up to 90% of the indigenous community, only culture-independent approaches (metagenomics) can capture the true indigenous microbial diversity. The objective of our study is to generate, develop, deploy and store metagenomic database of the microbial communities found in hydrocarbon resource environments. In order to achieve this, next-generation pyrosequencing technologies were used for a 16S rRNA gene-based profiling of microbial communities in a variety of hydrocarbon resource environments.