Metagenomic characterization of the entire microbial community in a radiochemical sample

The detection of the mixed microbial communities in an environmental sample has represented a hurdle for long time due to the selection imposed by the culturing on specific media and by the minimum number of cells required. Here, we simulated a contamination of a sterile radiochemical by adding a known amount of Staphylococcus epidermidis and we developed a methodology, based on a metagenomic approach, to isolate DNA without a previous selection, from a low starting material and in limited time. The obtained sequences have been further used to characterize the microbial populations present in the sample using a bioinformatics tool.