Abstract
The present study was conducted to analyze bacterial diversity profile of Cholistan desert located in Pakistan. The study investigates the influence of physicochemical parameters of soil on distribution of different bacteria at all taxonomic levels and also study the distribution pattern between different desert environments, particularly rhizospheric and bulk desert sands. Species richness showed phyla Proteobacteria and Chloroflexi as the dominant OTUs in all the samples. Besides the two phyla, the rhizospheric soils with root remnants were dominated by Firmicutes, Deinococcus-Thermus, Actinobacteria and Acidobacteri, while phylum Thermotogae was present in significant quantity in rhizosheaths devoid of roots. In non-rhizospheric desert soils, a considerable number of OTUs belonged to phyla Proteobacteria, Chloroflexi, Bacteroidetes and Acidobacteria. An important finding from this study is that a bulk portion of the OTUs were assigned to unclassified taxa, indicating a large repertoire of unexplored taxa in the desert ecology of Pakistan. Distribution of taxonomic groups among various regions of the desert was collaborating well with the physicochemical parameters of the sites. The findings of this study establish the fundamental relationships between desert ecosystem, specific native plant and the total bacterial flora. This is the first study of microbial community analysis of any desert in Pakistan and thus, will serve as a future platform to explore further on desert ecosystem functioning by employing the ever-changing biotechnological tools.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Science & Technology Basic Resources Investigation Program of China (No. 2017FY100300), Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region regional coordinated innovation project (Shanghai Cooperation Organization Science and Technology Partnership Program, No. 2017E01031) and China Biodiversity Observation Networks (Sino BON).
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“Conceptualization, IA and WJL; Data curation, IA and WJL; Formal analysis, AA and AA; Funding acquisition, WJL; Investigation, AA and IUK; Methodology, AA, IA, NK and WJL; Project administration, IA and WJL; Resources, SMD and WJL; Software, AA; Supervision, IA and WJL; Writing—original draft, AA, IA and NK; Writing—review and editing, IA, IUK, AA, SMD and WJL”.
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It is to state that all the authors agreed to the contents of the manuscript and also agreed that we (Dr. Iftikhar Ahmed from Pakistan and Professor Dr. Wen-Jun Li from China) would act as corresponding authors for the publication. It is also declared that there is no conflict of interest with anyone and we do not have choice for any Editor and /or Reviewer to be included or excluded for reviewing this manuscript.
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Supplementary Materials: The following are available online, Table S1: Metadata for total number of reads and dropped reads of all samples, Table S2: Pair wise comparison between studied sites at phylum level, Table S3: List of actinobacterial taxonomic groups (out of 429 OTUs) in the rhizospheric desert soil of Cholistan, Pakistan. Numbers within the parentheses indicate the number of OTUs obtained. Difference in total sum of OTUs is due to the omission of few OTUs which belonged to unclassified taxonomic group.
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Amin, A., Ahmed, I., Khalid, N. et al. Insights on comparative bacterial diversity between different arid zones of Cholistan Desert, Pakistan. 3 Biotech 10, 224 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13205-020-02204-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13205-020-02204-6