Comparison of T-RFLP and DGGE techniques to assess denitrifier community composition in soil

Terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) and denaturing gradient gel electrophoresis (DGGE) and subsequent statistical analysis were compared with assess denitrifier community composition in agricultural soil based on the nosZ gene, encoding the nitrous oxide reductase. Analysis of binary or relative abundance-based metric and semi-metric distance matrices provided similar results for DGGE, but not for T-RFLP. Moreover, DGGE had a higher resolution than T-RFLP and binary data was better for discriminating between samples.