Environmental Sequencing Provides Reasonable Estimates of the Relative Abundance of Specific Picoeukaryotes

Abstract

Direct studies on marine picoeukaryotes by epifluorescence microscopy are problematic due to the lack of morphological features and due to the limited number and poor resolution of specific phylogenetic probes used in fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) routines. As a consequence, there is an increasing use of molecular methods, including high-throughput sequencing (HTS), to study marine microbial diversity. HTS can provide a detailed picture of the taxa present in a community and can reveal diversity not evident using other methods, but it is still unclear what the meaning of the sequence abundance in a given taxon is. Our aim is to investigate the correspondence between the relative HTS signal and relative cell abundances in selected picoeukaryotic taxa. Environmental sequencing provides reasonable estimates of the relative abundance of specific taxa. Better results are obtained when using RNA extracts as the templates, while the region of 18S ribosomal DNA had different influences depending on the taxa assayed.