Predicting the Presence and Abundance of Bacterial Taxa in Environmental Communities through Flow Cytometric Fingerprinting
J. Heyse, Florian Schattenberg, Peter Rubbens, Susann Müller, Willem Waegeman, Nico Boon, Ruben Props
Abstract
Monitoring of microbial community composition is crucial for both microbiome management research and applications. Existing technologies, such as plating and amplicon sequencing, can become laborious and expensive when high-throughput measurements are required. In recent years, flow cytometry-based measurements of community diversity have been shown to correlate well with those derived from 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing in several aquatic ecosystems, suggesting that there is a link between the taxonomic community composition and phenotypic properties as derived through flow cytometry. Here, we further integrated 16S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing and flow cytometry survey data in order to construct models that enable the prediction of both the presence and the abundances of individual bacterial taxa in mixed communities using flow cytometric fingerprinting. The developed pipeline holds great potential to be integrated into routine monitoring schemes and early warning systems for biotechnological applications.