PNNL

Abstract

Microarrays have become established tools for describing microbial systems, however the assessment of expression profiles for environmental microbial communities still presents unique challenges. Notably, the concentration of particular transcripts are likely very dilute relative to the pool of total RNA, and PCR-based amplification strategies are vulnerable to amplification biases and the appropriate primer selection. Thus, we apply a signal amplification approach, rather than template amplification, to analyze the expression of genes encoding selected lignin-degrading enzymes in soil. Controls in the form of known amplicons and cDNA from Phanerochaete chrysosporium were included and mixed with the soil cDNA both before and after the signal amplification in order to assess the dynamic range of the microarray. We demonstrate that restored prairie soil expresses a diverse range of genes encoding lignin-degrading enzymes following incubation with lignin substrate, while farmed agricultural soil does not. The mixed additions of control cDNA with soil cDNA does interfere with detection of the low abundance transcripts, nevertheless this microarray approach consistently reports the higher-abundance transcripts which present more robust signals.