Using Nanopore Sequencing to Test for Differences in Pitcher Plant Bacterial Communities

Microbial communities are an integral part of the physiology of their hosts and the ecosystem as a whole. A previous experiment by Bernardin et al. (2023) inoculated sterile, freshly opened pitchers of Sarracenia purpurea with one of three functionally distinct bacterial communities (M01, M06, M09) to test the impact of these communities on the plant host. This was followed by weekly measurements over 8 weeks that included substrate use, bacterial growth, respiration, etc. In this study, we investigated how time affects the richness and diversity of the three distinct bacterial communities using 16S Nanopore sequencing of Week 1 and Week 5 samples.