Comparative evaluation of rumen metagenome community using qPCR and MG-RAST.

Microbial profiling of metagenome communities have been studied extensively using MG-RAST and other related metagenome annotation databases. Although, database based taxonomic profiling provides snapshots of the metagenome architecture, their reliability needs to be validated through more accurate methods. Here, we performed qPCR based absolute quantitation of selected rumen microbes in the liquid and solid fraction of the rumen fluid of river buffalo adapted to varying proportion of concentrate to green or dry roughages and compared with the MG-RAST based annotation of the metagenomes sequences of 16S r-DNA amplicons and high throughput shotgun sequencing.