It has been lauded as a particularly alluring rebuttal to niche-theory which assumes that individuals of different species occupy different niches (an ecological term used in this case to imply the method by which an organism uses its environment and, while debatable, for the purpose of this essay is primarily determined by the metabolic capabilities of a given organism). In the context of microbial ecology, neutral theory assumes that all individuals are ecologically identical, that niche differences do not explain biodiversity patterns rather an individual in an environment interacts with and experiences its neighbors as if they were exactly the same. More specifically, this theory suggests all microbes in a particular environment have the same chances of reproduction and death regardless of species identity; again, the idea of speciation is entirely …show more content…
Pyrosequencing also starts with the aforementioned PCR amplification of target strands except that the strand to serve as the pyrosequencing template is biotinylated. After denaturation, the biotinylated single-stranded PCR amplicon is isolated and allowed to hybrdizine with a sequencing primer. The hybridized primer and single stranded template are incubated with enzymes DNA polymerase, ATP sulfurylase, luceriferase and apyrase as well as adenosine 5’ phosphosulfate and luciferin. As nucleotides are incorporated, ATP sulfurylase converts PPi to ATP which drive the luciferase mediated conversion of luciferin to oxyluciferin that generates visible light in amounts that are proportion to the amount of ATP. This is detected by sensors and seen as a peak where the ehight of each peak is proportional to the number of nucletodies incorporated. Addition of dNTPs is performed