Besides controlling bacterial production, bacterivorous protists are thought
to govern bacterial community structure. Experimental work has shown that both grazers
and bacteria developed strategies that may influence the bacterial community
structure. However, evidence from the natural environment is still lacking. Advances
in molecular techniques now allow the profiling of natural bacterial assemblages. We
used denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) to profile a bacterial community
in a continuous flow system that was fed with living and detrital cyanobacterial cells.
Although attempts mere made to remove eukaryotic grazers, heterotrophic nanoflagellates
were growing in the second stages of the system. Analysis of DGGE patterns by
nonmetric multidimensional scaling showed a large change in the bacterial community
structure coinciding with the peak in protist numbers. Our results show that
DOGE analysis can be used to facilitate studies on the effect of protistan grazing on
natural bacterial communities
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