Abstract
As a consequence of the severe climatic change affecting our entire world, many lakes in the Andes Cordillera are likely to disappear within a few decades. One of these lakes is Lejía Lake, located in the central Atacama Desert. The objectives of this study were: (1) to characterize the bacterial community from Lejía Lake shore soil (LLS) using 16S rRNA sequencing and (2) to test a culture-based approach using a soil extract medium (SEM) to recover soil bacteria. This extreme ecosystem was dominated by three phyla: Bacteroidetes, Proteobacteria, and Firmicutes with 29.2, 28.2 and 28.1% of the relative abundance, respectively. Using SEM, we recovered 7.4% of the operational taxonomic units from LLS, all of which belonged to the same three dominant phyla from LLS (6.9% of Bacteroidetes, 77.6% of Proteobacteria, and 15.3% of Firmicutes). In addition, we used SEM to recover isolates from LLS and supplemented the culture medium with increasing salt concentrations to isolate microbial representatives of salt tolerance (Halomonas spp.). The results of this study complement the list of microbial taxa diversity from the Atacama Desert and assess a pipeline to isolate selective bacteria that could represent useful elements for biotechnological approaches.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Fondecyt Grants 1151384 to MG, 3170523 to DM, 11161083 to RP and 1160802 to VC and Fondap Grant 15090007. JM was supported by CONICYT Ph.D. fellowship 21120313. We are grateful to Myriam González for her technical assistance.
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Communicated by A. Oren.
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Mandakovic, D., Maldonado, J., Pulgar, R. et al. Microbiome analysis and bacterial isolation from Lejía Lake soil in Atacama Desert. Extremophiles 22, 665–673 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00792-018-1027-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00792-018-1027-6