Abstract: Extracting and purifying a representative fraction of bacteria from soil is necessary for the application of many techniques of microbial ecology. Here the influence of different soil types on the quantitative and qualitative recovery of bacteria by soil grinding and Nycodenz density gradient centrifugation was investigated. Three soils presenting contrasted physicochemical characteristics were used for this study. For each soil, the total (AODC: acridine orange direct count) and culturable (cfa: colony-forming units) bacterial densities were measured in three distinct fractions: (i) the primary soil, (ii) the soil pellet (soil remaining after centrifugation), and (iii) the extracted cells. The automated-ribosomal intergenic spacer analysis (A-RISA) was used to characterize the community structure directly from the DNA extracted from each fraction. The physicochemical characteristics of soils were found to influence both the efficiency of bacterial cell recovery and the representativeness of the extracted cells in term of community structures between the different fractions. Surprisingly, the most representative extracted cells were obtained from the soil exhibiting the lowest efficiency of cell recovery. Our results demonstrated that quantitative and qualitative cell recovery using Nycodenz density gradient centrifugation are not necessarily related and could be differentially biased according to soil type. (c) 2006 Elsevier SAS. All rights reserved.