TY - JOUR AU - dos Santos, Hellen Ribeiro Martins AU - Argolo, Caio Suzart AU - Argôlo-Filho, Ronaldo Costa AU - Loguercio, Leandro Lopes PY - 2019 DA - 2019/04/08 TI - A 16S rDNA PCR-based theoretical to actual delta approach on culturable mock communities revealed severe losses of diversity information JO - BMC Microbiology SP - 74 VL - 19 IS - 1 AB - Subunits of ribosomal RNA genes (rDNAs) characterized by PCR-based protocols have been the proxy for studies in microbial taxonomy, phylogenetics, evolution and ecology. However, relevant factors have shown to interfere in the experimental outputs in a variety of systems. In this work, a ‘theoretical’ to ‘actual’ delta approach was applied to data on culturable mock bacterial communities (MBCs) to study the levels of losses in operational taxonomic units (OTUs) detectability. Computational and lab-bench strategies based on 16S rDNA amplification by 799F and U1492R primers were employed, using a fingerprinting method with highly improved detectability of fragments as a case-study tool. MBCs were of two major types: in silico MBCs, assembled with database-retrieved sequences, and in vitro MBCs, with AluI digestions of PCR data generated from culturable endophytes isolated from cacao trees. SN - 1471-2180 UR - https://doi.org/10.1186/s12866-019-1446-2 DO - 10.1186/s12866-019-1446-2 ID - dos Santos2019 ER -