Inside the Atacama Desert: uncovering the living microbiome of an extreme environment.

ABSTRACT: The Atacama Desert in Chile is one of the driest and most inhospitable places on Earth. To analyze the diversity and distribution of microbial communities in such an environment, one of the most important and challenging steps is DNA extraction. Using commercial environmental DNA extraction protocols, a mixture of living, dormant, and dead cells of microorganisms is extracted, but separation of the different DNA pools is almost impossible. To overcome this problem, we applied a novel method on soils across a west-east moisture transect in the Atacama Desert to distinguish between extracellular DNA (eDNA) and intracellular DNA (iDNA) at the cell extraction level. Here, we show that a large number of living and potentially active microorganisms, such as Acidimicrobiia, Geodermatoph

SUBMITTER: Bartholomaus A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11653780 | biostudies-literature | 2024 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature