Can anyone suggest a method to enumerate nitrifying bacteria from the saline water lake, where the commercially bivalve fishery is going on? Nitrifying bacteria are a narrow species in the environment, and are found in lowest numbers where considerable amounts of ammonia are present. Nitrifying bacteria thrives in lakes and rivers streams with high inputs and outputs of sewage and wastewater and freshwater because of the low ammonia content. I just want to study the nitrifying bacteria from the commercial fishing area and non-fishing areas.
I would recommend quantifying the effects of nitrifying bacteria rather than the number of cells. I think the effect (for instance grams of N per day per unit area) is much more informative than the amount of bacteria. There are gene probes used to help quantify nitrifying bacteria an FISH probes. I would suggest some rather simple incubations though in which captive samples (bottles or otherwise) are incubated with various spiked concentrations of ammonia and nitrite or both. I think looking at function in this way will provide a good comparison between your two sample areas.
Dear Dr. Andrew J. ray Thank you for your kind information. Is any reference available with you?
Attached is a paper in which the authors used N and C isotope level analysis to measure nitrification. This would of course be a more accurate way to go.
You can do the same through PCR-DGGE analysis or clone library construction of bacterial and archaeal amoA genes .
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