Measuring the biodiversity of microbial communities by flow cytometry

1. Measuring the microbial diversity in natural and engineered environments is important for ecosystem characterization, ecosystem monitoring and hypothesis testing. Although the conventional assessment through single marker gene surveys has resulted in major advances, the complete procedure remains slow (i.e., weeks to months), labour-intensive and susceptible to multiple sources of laboratory and data processing bias. Growing interest, in highly resolved, temporal surveys of microbial diversity, necessitates rapid, inexpensive and robust analytical platforms that require limited computational effort. 2. Here, we demonstrate that sensitive single-cell measurements of phenotypic attributes, obtained via flow cytometry, can provide fast (i.e., within minutes) first-line assessments of microbial diversity dynamics, without demanding extensive sample preparation and downstream data processing. We developed a data processing pipeline that fits bivariate kernel density functions to phenotypi...