FIGURE 1.

Workflow to assess the composition of a multispecies bacterial community using high-throughput qPCR. Schematic representation shows the main steps of the method. A synthetic bacterial community (i.e., an artificial assembly of well-characterized species) is incubated under various controlled conditions that result in different community compositions over time. Following community DNA extraction from various environments, the abundance of 16S rRNA genes from each individual species is quantified on a single Fluidigm 48 × 48 Dynamic Array. In addition to relative abundance, absolute abundance of species can be expressed as equivalent genome copy numbers back-calculated for each species using standard curves run on the same array.