Abstract
The Kyzyl-Kum Desert extends over an area of 300,000 Km2, in the region bordering Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan and is mainly covered by sand dunes. The Kyzyl-Kum desert is also known for its large deposits of minerals of economic interests, the exploitation of which is affecting the local ecosystem and increasing the desertification. We examined the bacterial biodiversity of surface sand samples from several sites from the Kyzyl-Kum desert using pyrosequencing of PCR amplified bacterial 16S rRNA genes from total extracted soil DNA. We also examined several physicochemical parameters of the sand samples to investigate any possible correlations between bacterial community structure and environmental drivers. The predominant bacterial phyla present in the samples were found to belong to members of the Actinobacteria, Proteobacteria and Bacteroidetes. The most abundant genera in our samples were found to belong to the Arthrobacter, Adhaeribacter and Roseomonas genera. We found that the relative abundance of members belonging to the Actinobacteria phylum, commonly found in desertic areas, increase in abundance in sites with higher content of organic matter and sulfur, whereas members of the Proteobacteria and Bacteroidetes phyla seems to diminish in abundance in coarse silt and fine-grained soils and those rich in magnesium, suggesting that those parameters might influence the bacterial community composition in this desertic area. This study is the first to provide new insights into the prokaryotic community composition from this unusual desert site.
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The datasets generated during and/or analysed during the current study are available in the Short Read Archive (accession number: SRP074819).
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Acknowledgements
We thank all the members of the Laboratoire de Génomique et Biodiversité Microbienne des Biofilms (LGBMB) of the Institute for Integrative Biology of the Cell (I2BC) and the Editor and three anonymous Reviewers for their interesting discussions, comments and suggestions. JO was a doctoral scholarship recipient from CONICYT Becas Chile (2012-2016). GR was a postdoctoral scholarship recipient from Brazil. This work was supported by the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), France.
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Osman JR and DuBow MS designed the experiments, review and editing; Kamilova E collected the sand samples; Fernandes GR and Osman JR conducted the experiments; Fernandes GR analyzed the data; Fernandes GR, Osman JR and Dubow MS wrote the manuscript.
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# In memory of Dr. Michael S. DuBow. On behalf of the authors, we thank him for his support as a tutor and scientific collaborator.
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Osman, J.R., Fernandes, G.R., Kamilova, E. et al. Genomic microbiome analyses of surface sand samples from the Kyzyl-Kum Desert (Uzbekistan): characterization and comparative study. Arch Microbiol 205, 90 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-023-03432-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-023-03432-z