Hypersaline environments microbiome: soils versus salterns.

Hypersaline environments comprise aquatic and terrestrial habitats. During recent years the prokaiyotic diversity and ecology of aquatic hypersaline environments has been addressed by metagenomic studies (Ventosa et al, 2015), In contrast, a limited number of studies on the microbial diversity of saline soils have been carried out, and they have been mainly focused on either Bacteria or Archaea. To improve our understanding of the prokaryotic community structure in saline soils, we studied recently the phylogenetic diversity and metabolic potential of the prokaryotic community of hypersaline soils from the Odiel saltmarshes (Spain) by metagenomics. Comparative analyses of these saline soils metagenomic databases with available metagenomic databases from salterns ponds allowed further identification of unique and shared traits of the prokaiyotic communities dwelling in these habitats. Saline soils harbored a more diverse prokaiyotic community and, in contrast to their aquatic counterparts, comprised sequences related to both known halophiles and taxa without known halophilic or halotolerant representatives, which reflects the physical heterogeneity of the soil matrix. The soils studied harbored unique communities mainly composed of halophilic taxa from the phyla Euryarchaeota, Proteobacteria, Balneolaeota, Bacteroidetes and Rhodothermaeota (Vera-Gargallo etal, 2018; 2019), [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]