Recovering cellular biomass from fluids using chemical flocculation. Issue 6 (16th October 2018)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Kenward, Paul A.; Simister, Rachel L.; Morgan‐Lang, Connor; Finke, Niko; Sturm, Arne; Hallam, Steven J.; Crowe, Sean A.
• Is Part Of: Environmental microbiology reports. Volume 10:Issue 6(2018)
• Page Start: 686
• Page End: 694
• Publication Date: 2018-10-16
• Subjects: Microbial ecology -- Periodicals; Environmental Microbiology -- Periodicals; Electronic journals; 579.17
• DOI: 10.1111/1758-2229.12690
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1758-2229

Abstract

Summary: We developed an efficient, scalable and inexpensive method for recovering cellular biomass from complex fluid matrices that cannot be processed using conventional filtration methods. The method uses chemical flocculation with iron oxyhydroxides, is capable of recovering greater than 90% of cellular biomass from fluids with more than 10 3 cells ml −1, and was validated using both mock communities and field samples. High quality DNA can be readily extracted from iron flocs using standard soil extraction kits. We applied chemical flocculation to fracing fluids from British Columbia, Canada and recovered a diversity of microbial taxa including abundant members of the Epsilon‐ and Deltaproteobacteria previously recovered from shale gas operations in the United States. Application of chemical flocculation presents new opportunities for scalable time‐series monitoring and experimentation on complex fluid matrices including microbial community profiling and shotgun metagenomics over gas production well completion cycles.