PHYLOGENETIC AND TAXONOMIC ANALYSIS OF BACTERIAL COMMUNITIES IDENTIFIED FROM THE METHANE EMISSION SITES USING 16S rRNA METAGENOMIC SEQUENCING

Since methane is a much more potent greenhouse gas than CO₂, scientists are worried about methane emissions from various sources. The major fields for methane production are fuel production sites, crop production fields, and waste disposal sites due to the anaerobic decomposition of animal and vegetation wastes at these sites by bacterial communities. Considering this, we studied bacterial communities in the Oil-Natural Gas Field and Paddy Field, two major sites for methane emission. In this study, the Illumina MiSeq platform was used to identify the methanotrophs and other bacterial communities involved in methane and natural gas production, explicitly using their 16S amplicon (V3-V4) hypervariable regions. This study observed several methane-oxidizing and producing bacterial families at the Oil-Natural Gas Field and Paddy Field.