Lipid Analysis of Sediments for Microbial Biomass and Community Structure

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Abstract
The microbial ecology of sediments has proved notoriously difficult to analyze because of the complex composition of nonliving structures. Examination of the lipid extracts of lyophilized core samples has proved a feasible method of biomass determination. Extractable lipid phosphate, shown in previous work to correlate well with other measures of the microbial biomass and to correlate with sedimentary extractable adenosine triphosphate (ATP), can be reproducibly determined from sedimentary materials. Labeled lipids and poly-β-hydroxybutyrate (PHB) added to the sediments can be recovered in reasonable yields, and analysis from a single estuarine station shows reasonable reproducibility between different core samples. The community structure as measured by the proportion of diacyl phospholipids, plasmalogens, phosphonolipids, and characteristic fatty acids as well as the bacterial endogenous storage material PHB shows differences between the different horizontal horizons in a sedimentary core that are consistent with expected changes based on predictions from bacterial monocultures.

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