Low Turnover of Soil Bacterial rRNA at Low Temperatures

Morten Dencker Schostag; Christian Nyrop Albers; Carsten Suhr Jacobsen; Anders Priemé

doi:10.3389/fmicb.2020.00962

Low Turnover of Soil Bacterial rRNA at Low Temperatures

Front Microbiol. 2020 May 25:11:962. doi: 10.3389/fmicb.2020.00962. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Morten Dencker Schostag^{1

2

3}, Christian Nyrop Albers^{1

3}, Carsten Suhr Jacobsen^{1

4}, Anders Priemé^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management, Center for Permafrost (CENPERM), University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
² Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark.
³ Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland, Copenhagen, Denmark.
⁴ Department of Environmental Science, Aarhus University, Roskilde, Denmark.

Abstract

Ribosomal RNA (rRNA) is used widely to investigate potentially active microorganisms in environmental samples, including soil microorganisms and other microbial communities that are subjected to pronounced seasonal variation in temperature. This raises a question about the turnover of intracellular microbial rRNA at environmentally relevant temperatures. We analyzed the turnover at four temperatures of RNA isolated from soil bacteria amended with ¹⁴C-labeled uridine. We found that the half-life of recently produced RNA increased from 4.0 days at 20°C to 15.8 days at 4°C, and 215 days at -4°C, while no degradation was detected at -18°C during a 1-year period. We discuss the implications of the strong temperature dependency of rRNA turnover for interpretation of microbiome data based on rRNA isolated from environmental samples.

Keywords: environmental RNA; rRNA half-life; ribosomal RNA; temperature response; uridine.