Question

Outline the limitations of culture-dependent methodologies to study microbial ecology, and describe how culture-independent tools may be used to study the ecology of environmental microbial communities. (Min 2 and a half pages)

Answer 1

Culture dependent approaches depend on the growing prokaryotes in culture like agar and Culture independent methods depend on molecular methods to study microbes within their environments.

Limitation of culture based method- Risk of contamination, need time and resource with high skill level of practitioners, depend on phenotype character of organism ect.

Culture independent methods – This method are based on the molecular biology of the organism and and analyses of the small subunit ribosomal RNA gene. Many method have been developed to directly study environmental microorganisms without growing in culture like single strand conformation polymorphism, gel electrophoresis, restriction fragment length polymorphism and fluorescence in situ hybridization. These methods allow scientist to analyze micro organism naturally in situ, which include their gene protein and metabolite.