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Diversity of culturable actinomycetes in hyper-arid soils of the Atacama Desert, Chile

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Abstract

The Atacama Desert presents one of the most extreme environments on Earth and we report here the first extensive isolations of actinomycetes from soils at various locations within the Desert. The use of selective isolation procedures enabled actinomycetes to be recovered from arid, hyper-arid and even extreme hyper-arid environments in significant numbers and diversity. In some cases actinomycetes were the only culturable bacteria to be isolated under the conditions of this study. Phylogenetic analysis and some phenotypic characterisation revealed that the majority of isolates belonged to members of the genera Amycolatopsis, Lechevalieria and Streptomyces, a high proportion of which represent novel centres of taxonomic variation. The results of this study support the view that arid desert soils constitute a largely unexplored repository of novel bacteria, while the high incidence of non-ribosomal peptide synthase genes in our isolates recommend them as promising material in screening for new bioactive natural products.

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Acknowledgments

CKO is grateful to the Nigerian Petroleum Development Fund for a National Biotechnology Scholarship while ATB is indebted to The Leverhulme Trust for the award of an Emeritus Fellowship. We thank three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Biology, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK

    Chinyere K. Okoro, Roselyn Brown, Amanda L. Jones & Michael Goodfellow

  2. Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, University of Chile, Beauchef 861, Santiago, Chile

    Barbara A. Andrews & Juan A. Asenjo

  3. Department of Biosciences, University of Kent, Canterbury, Kent, CT2 7NJ, UK

    Alan T. Bull

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  1. Chinyere K. Okoro
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  2. Roselyn Brown
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  3. Amanda L. Jones
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  6. Michael Goodfellow
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  7. Alan T. Bull
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Correspondence to Alan T. Bull.

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Okoro, C.K., Brown, R., Jones, A.L. et al. Diversity of culturable actinomycetes in hyper-arid soils of the Atacama Desert, Chile. Antonie van Leeuwenhoek 95, 121–133 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10482-008-9295-2

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