Molecular, biochemical, and physiological approaches for understanding the ecology of denitrification.

One of the major challenges in microbial ecology for the future is to establish links between structural and functional biodiversity. This is particularly difficult when one is interested in a phylogenetically diversified function such as denitrification. The data banks are very rich in functional gene sequences (nirS in this study), but most of them were obtained from not yet cultivated bacteria, and thus must be supplemented by sequences of organisms from the environment for which we could associate a taxonomic position and physiological characteristics.