Candidatus Abditibacter, a novel genus within the Cryomorphaceae, thriving in the North Sea.

Coastal phytoplankton blooms are frequently followed by successive blooms of heterotrophic bacterial clades. The class Flavobacteriia within the Bacteroidetes has been shown to play an important role in the degradation of high molecular weight substrates that become available in the later stages of such blooms. One of the flavobacterial clades repeatedly observed over the course of several years during phytoplankton blooms off the coast of Helgoland, North Sea, is Vis6.

A pipeline for targeted metagenomics of environmental bacteria.

Background: Metagenomics and single cell genomics provide a window into the genetic repertoire of yet uncultivated microorganisms, but both methods are usually taxonomically untargeted. The combination of fluorescence in situ hybridization (FISH) and fluorescence activated cell sorting (FACS) has the potential to enrich taxonomically well-defined clades for genomic analyses.

Methods: Cells hybridized with a taxon-specific FISH probe are enriched based on their fluorescence signal via flow cytometric cell sorting.