Investigating Novel Proteins in Acidophilic Biofilm Communities

Microbial communities are the basis for engineered environmental bioprocesses. However, current methods, including 16S rDNA-based techniques, are incapable of providing information on the function of the community or its members, and thus the community remains a black box from a functional perspective. Microbial community proteomics has the potential to detect proteins expressed in an environment under different conditions. In this approach, a mixture of microorganisms can be viewed as a meta-organism, in which population shifts are a form of functional response. Despite its possible advantages, the use of meta-proteomics has been almost completely unexplored.