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Applied and Environmental Microbiology, July 2002, p. 3628-3633, Vol. 68, No. 7
0099-2240/02/$04.00+0 DOI: 10.1128/AEM.68.7.3628-3633.2002
Copyright © 2002, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
Use of 16S Ribosomal DNA for Delineation of Marine Bacterioplankton Species
Åke Hagström,1* Thomas Pommier,1 Forest Rohwer,2 Karin Simu,1 Willem Stolte,1 Dominika Svensson,1 and Ulla Li Zweifel1
Marine Microbiology, BoM, Kalmar University, S-39182 Kalmar, Sweden,1
Biology Department, LS317, San Diego State University, San Diego, California2
Received 22 January 2002/
Accepted 12 April 2002

ABSTRACT
All of the marine bacterioplankton-derived 16S ribosomal DNA
sequences previously deposited in GenBank were reanalyzed to
determine the number of bacterial species in the oceanic surface
waters. These sequences have been entered into the database
since 1990. The rate of new additions reached a peak in 1999
and subsequently leveled off, suggesting that much of the marine
microbial species richness has been sampled. When the GenBank
sequences were dereplicated by using 97% similarity as a cutoff,
1,117 unique ribotypes were found. Of the unique sequences,
609 came from uncultured environmental clones and 508 came from
cultured bacteria. We conclude that the apparent bacterioplankton
species richness is relatively low.

INTRODUCTION
There are approximately 10
6 bacterial cells per ml of surface
seawater throughout the world's oceans (
8). While this number
has been known for at least 30 years, we still do not know how
many bacterial species are actually present in the bacterioplankton.
Addressing this question has been hampered by uncertainty as
to how to define a bacterial species and a distrust of conventional
cultivation techniques due to the sharp discrepancy between
total and viable counts in seawater. The latter obstacle was
circumvented by cloning and sequencing of 16S ribosomal DNAs
(rDNAs) from uncultured marine microbial communities. Initially,
these studies suggested that there is an immense amount of marine
microbial diversity (
15,
27).
Bacterial "species" are usually described by empirical criteria. DNA-DNA cross-hybridization of >70% has been suggested to indicate that two bacteria belong to the same species (28). This criterion was further developed by several authors who demonstrated that bacteria with cross-hybridization levels of >70% have a 16S rDNA sequence similarity of >97% (3, 6, 23). Hagström et al. analyzed the degree of DNA-DNA relatedness versus 16S similarity for a large number of marine isolates and found that a 16S rDNA sequence similarity of
97% is a reasonable level for grouping bacteria into species (16). The species definition based on 16S rDNA similarity has matured to the point that it has been entered into a major microbiological textbook (17).
The number of reported marine bacterioplankton bacteria has grown mostly by sequencing 16S rDNA genes from environmental DNA (1, 12, 15, 20). The assumed immense species richness of marine bacterioplankton is thus based solely on 16S rDNA diversity. However, as with all empirical classification schemes, the use of 16S rDNA is not without drawbacks. Reports of distinctly different copies of 16S rDNA from the same organism and phenotypic variability in bacterial isolates with high 16S rDNA similarity suggest an inherent uncertainty in the approach (21, 29, 30). Indeed, concerns about how to use new sequence information to place marine bacterioplankton into appropriate taxa has led researchers to add all new 16S sequencing data to the public databases. To date, no comprehensive overview of this vast amount of data has been presented. Thus, we tested the current assumption of great bacterioplankton species richness using 16S rDNAs sequences previously submitted to GenBank. Here we report the results of this analysis and conclude that the species richness of marine bacterioplankton is relatively low.
Sequences and their GenBank-associated files were downloaded from the National Center for Biotechnology Information website (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/). Sequences were initially dereplicated into groups with >97% identity by using the pairwise comparison program FastGroup (22). To determine which sequences represented another section of the same 16S rDNA gene, SeqMan II software (Lasergene version 5; DNA Star, Inc., Madison, Wis.) was used to build consensus 16S rDNA sequences. BLAST analyses (2) of the consensus sequences were done both with SeqMan II software and directly from the National Center for Biotechnology Information website (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/BLAST).
A 16S rDNA sequence similarity of >97% has been proposed as delimiter for bacterial species (16). To confirm this choice and to estimate the degree of variation in sequences from the same organism, 16S rDNAs from completely sequenced genomes were extracted and compared to each other by using SeqMan II software (Table 1). Essentially, contigs were assembled by using dissimilarity values from 0 to 20%, and the number of resulting single sequences (singletons) not compatible with the contig consensus was recorded. Percentages of singletons were plotted against dissimilarity levels (Fig. 1). The data set could be described by the first-order decay function:
 | (1) |
where
x is the dissimilarity
level,
a is the initial slope (at
x = 0) of the curve, and
y is the singleton ratio for the set of sequences. This model
indicates that high similarity levels do not guarantee complete
species singularity and uncertainty in sequences must be considered.
The reasons for this uncertainty could be errors in sequencing
and handling (
26), as well as intergenomic (i.e., between two
alleles in the same organism) and intraspecies (i.e., between
two organisms from the same species) variation.
Figure
1 shows that above a certain level of sequence similarity
no increase in the taxonomic resolution can be expected due
to the inherent uncertainty of the information. Using equation
1, it can be estimated that at the level suggested for species
delineation (

97%), a set of 100 small-subunit rDNA sequences
from the same organism is likely to contain 5.6 singletons (not
joining the contig consensus). This result demonstrates the
difficulty of using 16S rDNA sequences for taxonomic delineation
at high resolution. The empirical level of 97% sequence similarity
thus represents an upper limit of useful information.
Given that 97% similarity at the 16S rDNA locus is a useful criterion for dereplicating bacterial species, we asked what the bacterioplankton species richness in GenBank is. To retrieve the sequences for marine bacterioplankton from the database, four Boolean search strings were designed (Table 2). This was done as an iterative process; that is, retrieved sequences were manually checked and the search string was modified to maximize the number of sequences with the minimum of false positives. The uncultured-bacterium search string retrieved 1,467 sequences on 1 March 2001. To determine which sequences belong to the same bacterial species, the pairwise comparison program FastGroup (22) was used to group redundant sequences (
97% similar). Short sequences (<100 bp) were also removed. This reduced the number of sequences by 34%. Commonly used primer sites were used to order the fragments with the Escherichia coli 16S rDNA gene. The sequences were distributed all over the gene and in many cases were very short (
200 bp) (Fig. 2). Thus, fragments entered by different authors may belong to the same species although they cover different parts of the gene.
View this table:
[in this window]
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|
TABLE 2. Search strings used to assess marine bacterioplankton 16S rDNA sequences from the GenBank database (NCBI Entrez), 10 August 2001
|
The final improved Boolean search for 16S rDNAs was performed
on 10 August 2001 and resulted in 1,645 sequences from uncultured
bacteria. We found that 74 of the entries actually belonged
to cultured bacteria, and they were manually moved to that list
(described below). Another 125 uncultured clones were identified
during the searches for cultured bacteria, and these sequences
were added to this data set. Together with other small transfers
(Fig.
3), this raised the number of uncultured-bacterium sequences
to 1,726. By using SeqMan II software, sets of overlapping DNA
fragments were assembled into contigs based on a

100-bp overlap
and

97% similarity within the overlapping regions. Since conserved
regions in the 16S rDNA are shorter than 30 bp (
25), the 100-bp
overlap always includes at least one variable region. The continued
distillation process reduced the number of sequences by 55%
(Fig.
3). The resulting 780 uncultured-bacterium consensus sequences
were subjected to a BLAST search (
2) to find their closest related
sequences in GenBank (
4). In this step, 171 uncultured-bacterium
consensus sequences were found to have

97% similarity to cultured
bacteria and were therefore removed. Since the majority of these
bacteria lack a marine label, these sequences were not included
in the cultured-bacterioplankton group (Fig.
3). The final distillate
thus encompasses 609 uncultured-marine-bacterium consensus sequences.
Determining the number of cultured-bacterioplankton 16S rDNAs
was much less straightforward because many authors have submitted
sequences without referring to the origin of the isolate. An
indirect search excluding the search string that specifically
looked for cloned or uncultured entries (Table
2) resulted in
1,653 sequences. Our attempts to refine this search string were
largely unsuccessful; thus, these entries were manually sorted,
resulting in an initial data set for cultured bacteria of 1,010
sequences. By using SeqMan II software, a contig assembly, with
parameters identical to those for the uncultured-bacterium sequences,
was run for the cultured-bacterioplankton sequences. Based on
97% sequence similarity, 508 cultured-bacterium consensus sequences
were formed, and the degree of redundancy (50%) was similar
to that of the uncultured fraction (55%). It could be concluded
that in both groups the amount of redundant sequences in the
database was large even at the level of 100% similarity, and
this condition should be addressed in order to make the database
a more efficient tool.
Both the cultured and uncultured groups of bacteria were assigned to major taxonomic groupings (Fig. 4) by using the submitting author's suggestion or, when this information was lacking, by a BLAST (2) search looking for sequence similarity at the genus level (93% similarity) (6, 7, 29). The majority of the sequences could be assigned by this method; the remaining unassigned sequences were usually short, and many showed low similarity to bacteria. The
-Proteobacteria subdivision was dominant in the overall distribution of the cultured taxa, whereas the
-Proteobacteria were more prominent in the uncultured-bacterium distribution (Fig. 4). The major difference between the distributions was the presence of the bacterial groups Planctomycetales and Verrumicrobiales within the uncultured bacterioplankton. In the future, the relative importance of the different bacterioplankton taxa will be revised for a number of reasons. One important source of error may be the cloning bias, reported by Cottrell and Kirchman, which results in similar 16S sequences being retrieved from many sites while many of the other 16S rRNA genes present are missed (5). The results on bacterioplankton taxonomy presented here may, however, serve as an initial reference.
To test the phylogenetic grouping of the contigs obtained and
the accuracy of the database search, the well-established SAR11
gene cluster was given a closer look (
15). The SAR11 cluster
is an isolated branch of the

subdivision of the
Proteobacteria.
The worldwide occurrence of this 16S rDNA has been established
through clones from several libraries, which makes the SAR11
gene cluster a relevant control group. Two research groups have
presented phylogenetic trees for these particular sequences,
resulting in five or six main phylogenetic groups (
10,
13).
From published data, a list of 229 sequences belonging to the
SAR11 gene cluster was compiled (
http://www.bom.hik.se/~mme/genomics/distillationprocess.html).
Matches to these sequences were found in 29 of the 780 uncultured-bacterium
consensus sequences assembled. Of these 29 consensus sequences,
23 were singletons forming outliers that could not be assembled
with other sequences. The remaining 206 sequences were found
in six contigs corresponding to the SAR groups of Field et al.
(
10), two contigs each in A1 and B2 plus one contig each in
A2 and G1. Thus, since the comparison between the SAR11 cluster
and our assembled contigs conformed with the established lineages,
we concluded that a reasonable degree of confidence could be
put in the distillation process.
In the early 1990s, Ward et al. (27) invited marine microbiologists to work intensively on the sequencing of the 16S rDNA gene, expecting that marine bacterioplankton diversity would be great. The response during that decade was fast, and databases were rapidly extended. Based on the annual submissions, the number of uncultured-bacterioplankton sequences initially increased (Fig. 5). However, today the rate of new entries seems to have reached a plateau. Furthermore, the annual ratio of new consensus sequences per publication decreased towards the end of the investigated period. The reason for the reduction in new entries could be that interest in marine bacterioplankton diversity has diminished or that few new sequences are found, as indicated by the high degree of redundancy. The latter explanation has been pointed out by Giovannoni and Rappé, who stated that a relatively small number of marine bacterioplankton clades account for 80% of the marine bacteria 16S rDNA recovered from seawater (14). Also, based on our own experience of not finding many unknown sequences, the relatively low number of bacterial species found in the present analysis was not surprising. We concluded that the current database information may already constitute good coverage of the 16S rDNA sequences present in the pelagic marine environment.
Does this also imply good coverage of the global bacterioplankton
diversity? Estimates of the species richness for larger organisms
are commonly determined by extrapolating species numbers in
size categories (
18). However, this method seems to be inadequate
for microorganisms (
9). Since barriers to migration and dispersal
are ineffective, there is a strong tendency toward cosmopolitanism
of microorganisms (
11). Evolutionary bottlenecks (i.e., isolation
of a part of a population necessary for speciation) are therefore
unlikely among globally distributed organisms. Ciliates have
been used to test this view, since their morphological traits
can be used for identification. The almost flat species-area
curve found for free-living ciliated protozoa allowed Finlay
et al. to estimate the global species richness of ciliates at
not more than 3,000 species (
11). In a study of marine bacterioplankton
diversity, Hagström et al. found several examples of identical
isolates from different sea areas (
16). In this study we found
1,200 bacterial species, which, if they represent the existing
adaptation of bacteria to the marine pelagic environment, would
allow for 50 niches in each of three geographic regions (arctic,
temporal, and tropical) during each of four seasons and would
be divided between nearshore and offshore waters. Typically,
estimates of the number of dominant bacterioplankton species
based on denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis, terminal-restriction
fragment length polymorphism, and theoretical considerations
amount to fewer than 50 dominant species in a random water sample
(
24,
19). It is therefore tempting to suggest that a global
distribution of bacterioplankton species exists and that it
should be possible to determine this distribution with reasonable
accuracy.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This work was supported by Swedish Science Council grant NFR
B 650-19981070 (Å.H.) and by NSF grant SGER OCE-0116900
(F.R.).

FOOTNOTES
* Corresponding author. Mailing address: Marine Microbiology, BoM, Kalmar University, S-39182 Kalmar, Sweden. Phone: 46 480 447314. Fax: 46 480 447305. E-mail:
ake.hagstrom{at}hik.se.


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Applied and Environmental Microbiology, July 2002, p. 3628-3633, Vol. 68, No. 7
0099-2240/02/$04.00+0 DOI: 10.1128/AEM.68.7.3628-3633.2002
Copyright © 2002, American Society for Microbiology. All Rights Reserved.
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