Studies of Microbial Communities Affected by the Deepwater Horizon Spill

PI: Joe E. Lepo

This collaborative project will perform comparative analyses of the archaeal and bacterial communities in areas impacted by oil or oil dispersants. Samples collected pre- and post-oil impact from locations along the Central Northern Gulf of Mexico will be analyzed for their microbial community using culture dependent and independent techniques. Culture-independent studies will employ denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE), automated ribosomal intergenic spacer analyses (ARISA), and qPCR. Community diversity indexes will be calculated and compared between impacted and non-impacted samples. Target groups will be selectively amplified by DGGE and ARISA; the identification of species will be done using PCR amplification, cloning and traditional capillary sequencing. Selected samples (largest diversity of microbial communities) will be subject to high-throughput sequencing of rRNA genes. Sequence results will be compared to NCBI and the Ribosomal Database Project.