Microbial Diversity in Soil, Sand Dune and Rock Substrates of the Thar Monsoon Desert, India

Abstract

A culture-independent diversity assessment of archaea, bacteria and fungi in the Thar Desert in India was made. Six locations in Ajmer, Jaisalmer, Jaipur and Jodhupur included semi-arid soils, arid soils, arid sand dunes, plus arid cryptoendolithic substrates. A real-time quantitative PCR approach revealed that bacteria dominated soils and cryptoendoliths, whilst fungi dominated sand dunes. The archaea formed a minor component of all communities. Comparison of rRNA-defined community structure revealed that substrate and climate rather than location were the most parsimonious predictors. Sequence-based identification of 1240 phylotypes revealed that most taxa were common desert microorganisms. Semi-arid soils were dominated by actinobacteria and alpha proteobacteria, arid soils by chloroflexi and alpha proteobacteria, sand dunes by ascomycete fungi and cryptoendoliths by cyanobacteria. Climatic variables that best explained this distribution were mean annual rainfall and maximum annual temperature. Substrate variables that contributed most to observed diversity patterns were conductivity, soluble salts, Ca 2? and pH. This represents an important addition to the inventory of desert microbiota, novel insight into the abiotic drivers of community assembly, and the first report of biodiversity in a monsoon desert system.

Desert Microbes for Boosting Sustainable Agriculture in Extreme Environments

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Biogeography and organic matter removal shape long-term effects of timber harvesting on forest soil microbial communities

“…However, some families within the Actinobacteria declined with increasing OM removal ( Figure 6). There was also an expansion in harvested treatments of several stress-tolerant fungal taxa, including known pyrophilous fungi ( Supplementary Figure 9), lichenized (Lecanorales) and lichenolous fungi, and melanized rock-inhabiting fungi, such as members of the genus Phaeotheca (Sterflinger, 2000), and desert-adapted taxa such as Talaromyces (Stolk, 1965), Hormonema (Burford et al, 2003) and Preussia (Rao et al, 2016). Populations of Glomeromycota, a phylum of arbuscular mycorrhiza, were substantially expanded only in harvested sites in BS ON (undetected in REF and~1% of total ITS reads in OM3).…”

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“…In recent years, studies on biodiversity have attempted to describe soil microbiomes in different ecosystems (Forest, desert, wetland, grassland and desert steppe ecosystem) to understand the dynamics of microbial interactions with the environment (Rao et al, 2016;Li et al, 2016;Zhang et al, 2017;Wei et al, 2018a;Li et al, 2018b). It was discovered that there are significant differences in soil microbial community structures between different ecosystems.…”