Metagenomic Insights into the Uncultured Diversity and Physiology of Microbes in Four Hypersaline Soda Lake Brines.

ABSTRACT: Soda lakes are salt lakes with a naturally alkaline pH due to evaporative concentration of sodium carbonates in the absence of major divalent cations. Hypersaline soda brines harbor microbial communities with a high species- and strain-level archaeal diversity and a large proportion of still uncultured poly-extremophiles compared to neutral brines of similar salinities. We present the first "metagenomic snapshots" of microbial communities thriving in the brines of four shallow soda lakes from the Kulunda Steppe (Altai, Russia) covering a salinity range from 170 to 400 g/L. Both amplicon sequencing of 16S rRNA fragments and direct metagenomic sequencing showed that the top-level taxa abundance was linked to the ambient salinity: Bacteroidetes, Alpha-, and Gamma-proteobacteria were dominant

SUBMITTER: Vavourakis CD 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4766312 | biostudies-literature | 2016

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature