Analysis of Microbial Consortia Dynamics

DNA was extracted from each microbial consortium (in triplicate) using the UltraClean Microbial DNA Isolation Kit (MoBio Laboratories Inc., Carlsbad, CA, USA) according to the manufacturer’s instructions. Bacterial community structures, in the soil-derived microbial consortia (original- transfer 9) and in the final microbial consortia cultivated on the once-used plant biomass (selected- transfer 13: WS1-M, SG-M and CS-M), were evaluated by PCR-denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (PCR-DGGE). Primer sequences, PCR and DGGE conditions were previously reported (Jiménez et al. 2014a (link); Brossi et al. 2015 (link)). Fingerprinting results were analysed using GelCompar software (Applied Maths, Sint-Martens-Latem, Belgium). Thus, presence/absence band patterns were converted in Jaccard dissimilarity matrices for non-metric multi-dimensional scaling (nMDS) using Primer6 (PrimerE, Ivybridge, UK).