Abstract
Halophilic Archaea are widely distributed globally in hypersaline environments. However, little is known of how dominant halophilic archaeal genera are distributed across environments and how they may co-associate across ecosystems. Here, the archaeal community composition and diversity from hypersaline environments (> 300 g/L salinity; total of 33 samples) in the Qaidam Basin of China were investigated using high-throughput Illumina sequencing of 16S rRNA genes. The archaeal communities (total of 3,419 OTUs) were dominated by the class Halobacteria (31.7–99.6% relative abundances) within the phylum Euryarchaeota (90.8–99.9%). Five predominant taxa, including Halorubrum, Halobacterium, Halopenitus, Methanothrix, and Halomicrobium, were observed across most samples. However, several distinct genera were associated with individual samples and were inconsistently distributed across samples, which contrast with previous studies of hypersaline archaeal communities. Additionally, co-occurrence network analysis indicated that five network clusters were present and potentially reflective of interspecies interactions among the environments, including three clusters (clusters II, III, and IV) comprising halophilic archaeal taxa within the Halobacteriaceae and Haloferacaceae families. In addition, two other clusters (clusters I and V) were identified that comprised methanogens. Finally, salinity comprising ionic concentrations (in the order of Na+ > Ca2+ > Mg2+) and pH were most correlated with taxonomic distributions across sample sites.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China grant numbers 31760034, 31860030, and 21967018, in addition to the Key Research Foundation of Development and Transformation of Qinghai Province grant number 2019SF121, the Applied Basic Research Program of Qinghai Province grant numbers 2020ZJ767, and 2018ZJ930Q, as well as the Team’s Research Program of Microbial Resources in Salt-lakes of Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau grant number 2018KYT1. We would like to thank LetPub (www.letpub.com) for providing linguistic assistance during the preparation of this manuscript.
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DZ performed most of the experiments, and wrote the manuscript. GS and RW supervised the execution of the experiments, and analyzed the data. ZW, QH, QL, and XG performed the sample collection. JX, GS, and YL provided the bioinformatics technical assistance, and evaluated the data. All authors read and approved the final version of manuscript.
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Zhu, D., Shen, G., Wang, Z. et al. Distinctive distributions of halophilic Archaea across hypersaline environments within the Qaidam Basin of China. Arch Microbiol 203, 2029–2042 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-020-02181-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-020-02181-7