RESEARCH ARTICLE
Analysis of a Pool of Small Plasmids from Soil Heterotrophic Cultivable Bacterial Communities
Maria Cristiana Papaleo 1, Marco Fondi 1, Isabel Maida 1, Elena Perrin 1, Annamaria Bevivino 2, Claudia Dalmastri 2, Renato Fani *, 1
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2015Volume: 9
First Page: 98
Last Page: 109
Publisher ID: TOMICROJ-9-98
DOI: 10.2174/1874285801509010098
Article History:
Received Date: 12/7/2014Revision Received Date: 23/12/2014
Acceptance Date: 1/1/2015
Electronic publication date: 31/8/2015
Collection year: 2015

open-access license: This is an open access article licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/3.0/) which permits unrestricted, non-commercial use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the work is properly cited.
Abstract
In this work the analysis of the plasmid presence on soil aerobic cultivable heterotrophic bacterial communities was carried out checking a panel of 1,200 isolates, in order to establish the frequency of plasmid presence as well as the degree of plasmid flow between strains affiliated to the same or different taxon. Bacterial communities were isolated from two different sites of a 13-year experimental field with a clay-silt texture. Plasmid molecules were detected at low frequency (27 isolates, 2%) with a size ranging between 2 Kb and 40 Kb. The RAPD analysis performed on the plasmid-harboring isolates and the phylogenetic analysis of the whole community using the 16S rRNA gene sequences revealed the existence of transfer of the same plasmids between strains belonging to the same species and, in some cases, to different species of the same genus. As it might be expected, even though the viable cells title did not differ significantly between the two samplings, the overall data disclosed an uneven distribution of both species and plasmid-harboring strains.