The limitations of basic culturing techniques to generate biomass belonging to a single cellular lineage in the laboratory have led to the development of the molecular toolbox for studying microbes in mixtures. This toolbox is now burgeoning with goodies that take advantage of properties of cellular components such as DNA, RNA, lipids, proteins and metabolites to determine what organisms are present in a sample and what they are doing there.

One of the most successful approaches involves the analysis of ribosomal RNA molecules to discern relationships between specific phylotypes and the chemical transformations occurring in the environment for which they are responsible. There is a range of methods available to do this including fluorescence in situ hybridization linked with microautoradiography (Lee et al., 1999) and RNA stable isotope probing (Manefield et al., 2002). There are others, but you will be pleased to know that this is not a review of the toolbox.

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