To enhance the cloning efficiency, adenine overhangs were added to the amplicons as follows: The two purified inserts GF120918 order were mixed in a 1:1 molecular ratio (the reaction mixture thus contained 10–30 ng/μl DNA) and incubated in a volume of 20 μl with 1 × DyNAzyme™ Buffer (Finnzymes, Espoo, Finland), 0.2 mM dNTPs and 0.4 U of DyNAzyme™ II DNA Polymerase (Finnzymes, Espoo, Finland) for 40 min at 72°C. The cloning was performed with the QIAGEN® PCR Cloning plus Kit (www.selleckchem.com/products/GDC-0449.html Qiagen, Hilden, Germany) according to the manufacturer’s instructions. For the ligation reaction, 2 μl of the reaction mixture used for adding adenine overhangs to the amplicons was used as

an insert. The ligation reaction was incubated overnight at 4°C. The plasmids were isolated and purified from the E. coli culture using MultiScreenHTS (Millipore, Billerica, MA, USA), and aliquots were stored in -80°C. The cloned inserts were amplified from the pDrive plasmids using M13 forward 5′-GTAAAACGACGGCCAGT-3′ and M13 reverse primers 5′-AACAGCTATGACCATG-3′, visualized on a 1% agarose gel, stained with ethidium bromide and purified using a MultiScreen PCR384 Filter Plate (Millipore, PCI-32765 purchase Billerica, MA, USA). Sequencing of the 5′-end of 16S rDNA clones was performed with primer pD’ 5′-GTATTACCGCGGCTGCTG-3′ corresponding to the E. coli 16S rRNA gene position 536-518 [45]. Near full-length sequencing was performed on one representative of each OTU showing less than

95% similarity to any EMBL nucleotide sequence database entry. For this purpose, primers pF’ 5′-ACGAGCTGACGACAGCCATG-3′ [45] and pE 5′-AAACTCAAAGGAATTGACGG-3′ [46], corresponding to E. coli 16S rRNA gene positions 1073-1053 and 908–928, respectively, were used. Sequencing of the products was performed with the BigDye terminator cycle sequencing kit (Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA, USA). For templates that failed to be sequenced due to high G+C content, 1% (v/v) of dimethyl sulfoxide GNE-0877 was added to the reaction mixture. The sequencing products were cleaned with Montage SEQ96 plates (Millipore, Billerica, MA,

USA) and run with an ABI 3700 Capillary DNA Sequencer (Applied Biosystems, Foster City, CA, USA). Sequence analysis and alignment Sequences were checked manually utilizing the Staden Package pregap4 version 1.5 and gap v4.10 assembly programs [47], and primer sequences were removed. Sequences that occurred in more than one clone library were considered non-chimeric. Revealing the potential chimeras was also performed by manually browsing the ClustalW 1.83 sequence alignment [48] with Bio Edit version 7.0.5.3 [49] and for the near full-length sequences using Ribosomal Database Project II Chimera Check [50]. Sequences from %G+C fractions 25–30, 40–45 and 55–60 with accession numbers AM275396-AM276371 [21] were added prior to further analyses. Sequences of all fractions and the unfractioned sample were aligned separately with ClustalW 1.