Molecular Phylogeny of Arctic Microbes Using Metagenomic Approach

Abstract

Metagenomic approach to the characterization of uncultured and mixed bacterial consortium has been used in this study for a few arctic micro-organisms. Arctic soil, collected from one spot at Ny Alesund in Svalbard was used as the source of such organisms and enriched in culture medium. Only psychrotrophic microbes were chosen which could grow from 5˚C to 20˚C. Total genomic DNA isolated from the consortium was used as template for amplifying the 16S rRNA genes using the conserved forward and reverse primers. The amplified mixture of 1.4 kb DNA was cloned in pGEM- T Easy vector and individual 16S rDNA sequences were determined by automated sequencing. A phylogenetic tree was constructed using MEGA 5 software which enlists 19 isolates in the consor- tium. Most of these arctic bacteria were Bacillus species as these were isolated from a single spot.