Microbial diversity in the hypersaline Lake Meyghan, Iran

Abstract

Lake Meyghan is one of the largest and commercially most important salt lakes in Iran. Despite its inland location and high altitude, Lake Meyghan has a thalassohaline salt composition suggesting a marine origin. Inputs of fresh water by rivers and rainfall formed various basins characterized by different salinities. We analyzed the microbial community composition of three basins by isolation and culturing of microorganisms and by analysis of the metagenome. The basins that were investigated comprised a green ~50 g kg−1 salinity brine, a red ~180 g kg−1 salinity brine and a white ~300 g kg−1 salinity brine. Using different growth media, 57 strains of Bacteria and 48 strains of Archaea were isolated. Two bacterial isolates represent potential novel species with less than 96% 16S rRNA gene sequence identity to known species. Abundant isolates were also well represented in the metagenome. Bacteria dominated the low salinity brine, with Alteromonadales (Gammaproteobacteria) as a particularly important taxon, whereas the high salinity brines were dominated by haloarchaea. Although the brines of Lake Meyghan differ in geochemical composition, their ecosystem function appears largely conserved amongst each other while being driven by different microbial communities.

A glimpse of the prokaryotic diversity of the Large Aral Sea reveals novel extremophilic bacterial and archaeal groups

“…Hypersaline ecosystems such as salt lakes are distributed globally, but differ from each other in terms of salt concentration and chemical composition as determined by local geological characteristics (de la Haba, Sánchez‐Porro, Marquez, & Ventosa, ; Naghoni et al, ; Simachew, Lanzen, Gessesse, & Øvreas, ; Tazi, Breakwell, Harker, & Crandall, ). In addition to being hypersaline, these ecosystems are often characterized by other environmental extremes such as high alkalinity, low oxygen concentration and high UV irradiation (Edwardson & Hollibaugh, ; Fernandez et al, ; Javor, ; Naghoni et al, ). Hypersaline lakes offer a unique environment for microbial life and are considered as hot spots of microbial diversity (Ley et al, ; Oren, ).…”

Spatiotemporal variations in microbial diversity across the three domains of life in a tropical thalassohaline lake (Dziani Dzaha, Mayotte Island)

“…In contrast, continental thalassohaline lakes that are permanently landlocked with hardly any exchange with the sea have been the focus of a limited number of investigations (Makhdoumi‐Kakhki, Amoozegar, Kazemi, Pašić, & Ventosa, ; Naghoni et al., ). Lake Dziani Dzaha (Mayotte) has been recently classified as a thalassohaline lake and presents several atypical features that make it an excellent model to examine the genetic structure and dynamics of microbial communities across environmental niches (Gérard et al., ; Leboulanger et al., ).…”

Prokaryotic and viral community of the sulfate‐rich crust from Peñahueca ephemeral lake, an astrobiology analogue

“…As shown in Supporting Information Fig. S3, Peñahueca appears in a separate branch within a cluster including the athalassohaline environments Salar Grande (Crits‐Christoph et al ., ), ‘red’ and ‘white’ samples from Meyghan Lagoon (Naghoni et al ., ) as well as the marine saltern at Isla Cristina (Huelva, Spain; Fernandez et al ., ). BLASTN comparisons indicated that only the samples from the Meyghan Lagoon and Salar Grande metagenome presented some similarities (always below 20%) with PH1‐SC.…”

“…References: (1) This work; (2) Naghoni et al ., ; (3) Vavourakis et al ., ; (4) Ghai et al ., ; (5) Crits‐Christoph et al ., ; (6) Fernandez et al ., ; (7) Rusch et al ., .…”

“…Peñahueca datasets were compared with other metagenomes using BLASTN and MetaFast (Ulyantsev et al ., ). The following halophilic collections were used in this analysis: three microbial metagenomes from Santa Pola saltern (Spain; SP13, SP19 and SS37; Ghai et al ., ), one from Isla Cristina saltern (Spain, IC‐21; Fernandez et al ., ); the metagenome of the endolithic community from Salar‐Grande (Chile; Crits‐Christoph et al ., ), the hypersaline Lake Meyghan (Iran; Naghoni et al ., ) – and six metagenomes from alkaline lakes (Russia; Vavourakis et al ., ). The low‐salinity (6%) dataset collection from Punta Cormorant from the GOS datasets (PC6, Rusch et al ., ) was also included in the analysis.…”