I would like to identify (by 16SrRNR sequencing and blasting) bacteria (pure cultures) prevalent in a soil. Which primer pair or sets of primer pairs would be the most useful for that reason?
Universal eubacterial 16S rDNA primers, fD1 - 5'-GAG TTT GAT CCT GGC TCA-3’ and rP2 - 5'-ACG GCT AAC TTG TTA CGA CT-3’ (Weisburg et al., 1991). The PCR cycling conditions were as follows: an initial denaturation for 5 min at 95 ºC, followed by 30 cycles of denaturation at 94ºC for 1 min, annealing at 59ºC for 1 min and extension at 72 ºC for 2 min and then a final extension for 5 min at 72ºC.
Here is a recent paper which asks your question, and supplementary table 1 of that paper from: http://www.arb-silva.de/download/archive/primer_evaluation/
Which primers would be more useful: those that help to amplify all or almost all 16S gene or those that amplify only certain part of the gene , for instance 550bp?
We tried many primer pairs reported in the literature and settled for 27F (5′ -AGAGTTTGATCMTGGCTCAG-3′ ) and 511R (5′ -GCGGCTGCTGGCACRKAGT-3′ ). In our experience, this pair works well for anaerobic digester and soil samples.
Liu AC, Chou CY, Chen LL, Kuo CH* (2015) Bacterial community dynamics in a swine wastewater anaerobic reactor revealed by 16S rDNA sequence analysis. Journal of Biotechnology 194: 124-131. DOI: 10.1016/j.jbiotec.2014.11.026
As the names implied, this pair will amplify ~500bp of the 16S 5' end. After adding the barcode (for multiplexing) and sequencing adaptors, the final product is suitable for either 454 Jr. or Illumina MiSeq paired-end platform.
We and our collaborators use 63f+1387r (5’- CAGGCCTAACACATGCAAGTC + 5’-CGGCGGWGTGTACAAGGC).
We use it for soil and permafrost isolates.
Marchesi, J. R., Sato, T., Weightman, A. J., Martin, T. A., Fry, J. C., Hiom, S. J., & Wade, W. G. (1998). Design and Evaluation of Useful Bacterium-Specific PCR Primers That Amplify Genes Coding for Bacterial 16S rRNA. Applied and Environmental Microbiology, 64(2), 795–799.
All of this was three years ago. Did you find your set of primers of soil bacteria identification? I am doing the same in my lab by sanger sequencing and now I have the same question that you had three years ago.
The best way now is to use NGS. Anyway the universal primers like 27F and 515R can help to determine genus, but not species. I still don't know the best set of the primers for reliable determination at the species level...Maybe because species in procaryotes sometimes is too artificial and subjective level of taxonomical unit:)
As time has passed, there are now further publications describing applications and benchmarking resolution and performance of different 16S regions by application:
Article A comprehensive benchmarking study of protocols and sequenci...
Article Resolving Species Level Changes in a Representative Soil Bac...
At a recent conference I have also seen a nice droplet microfluidic approach based on fusion-PCR to combine two amplicons from different 16S regions of the same cell (per droplet) into one fragment for Illumina sequencing with much improved species resolution and cell counts. I am looking forward to this being published.