Graphene oxide (GO) has been suggested as an efficient assistant additive to eliminate non-specific amplification of the polymerase chain reaction (PCR). Although many studies have focused on exploring its molecular mechanism, the practice of GO on the quantitation of microbial community has not been implemented yet. In this study, GO was added in PCR system to explore the changes on removing typical amplification errors, such as chimera and mismatches on two kinds of mock communities (an evenly mixed and a staggered mock communities) and environmental samples. High-throughput sequencing of bacterial and fungal communities, based on 16S rRNA genes and internal transcribed spacers (ITS) respectively, showed that GO could significantly increase large segmental error (chimeric sequence) in PCR procedure while had no specific effect on point error (mismatched sequence). Besides, GO reduced the α-diversity of community, and changed the composition of fungal community more obviously than bacterial community. Our study provides the first quantitative data on microbial community level to prove the negative effect of GO, and also indicates that there may be a more complex interaction between GO and comprehensive DNA fragments in PCR process.

中文翻译：

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氧化石墨烯对微生物群落调查 PCR 扩增的影响。

氧化石墨烯 (GO) 已被建议作为一种有效的辅助添加剂，以消除聚合酶链反应 (PCR) 的非特异性扩增。尽管许多研究都集中在探索其分子机制，但尚未实施 GO 在微生物群落定量方面的实践。本研究在 PCR 系统中加入 GO，探索去除两种模拟群落（均匀混合和交错模拟群落）和环境样本上典型的扩增错误，如嵌合和错配的变化。细菌和真菌群落的高通量测序，分别基于 16S rRNA 基因和内部转录间隔区 (ITS)，表明GO可以显着增加PCR过程中的大片段错误（嵌合序列），而对点错误（错配序列）没有特定影响。此外，GO降低了群落的α多样性，并且比细菌群落更明显地改变了真菌群落的组成。我们的研究提供了第一个微生物群落水平的定量数据，以证明 GO 的负面影响，也表明 GO 与 PCR 过程中综合 DNA 片段之间可能存在更复杂的相互作用。