Comparison of bacterial diversity in proglacial soil from Kafni Glacier, Himalayan Mountain ranges, India, with the bacterial diversity of other glaciers in the world

Abstract

Two 16S rRNA gene clone libraries (KF and KS) were constructed using two soil samples (K7s and K8s) collected near Kafni Glacier, Himalayas. The two libraries yielded a total of 648 clones. Phyla Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Chloroflexi Firmicutes, Proteobacteria, Spirochaetae, Tenericutes and Verrucomicrobia were common to the two libraries. Phyla Acidobacteria, Chlamydiae and Nitrospirae were present only in KF library, whereas Lentisphaerae and TM7 were detected only in KS. In the two libraries, clones belonging to phyla Bacteroidetes and Proteobacteria were the most predominant. Principal component analysis (PCA) revealed that KF and KS were different and arsenic content influenced the differences in the percentage of OTUs. PCA indicated that high water content in the K8s sample results in high total bacterial count. PCA also indicated that bacterial diversity of KF and KS was similar to soils from the Pindari Glacier, Himalayas; Samoylov Island, Siberia; Schrimacher Oasis, Antarctica and Siberian tundra. The eleven bacterial strains isolated from the above two soil samples were phylogenetically related to six different genera. All the isolates were psychro-, halo- and alkalitolerant. Amylase, lipase and urease activities were detected in the majority of the strains. Long chain, saturated, unsaturated and branched fatty acids were predominant in the psychrotolerant bacteria.

Prospecting cold deserts of north western Himalayas for microbial diversity and plant growth promoting attributes

“…2C). The presence of viable bacteria belonging to these four phyla has been widely documented in polar, non-polar and Arctic region (38,45). Bacteria from phylum Actinobacteria and Firmicutes were usually found to be pre-dominant, followed by members of the Proteobacteria and Bacteroidetes.…”

Bacterial diversity of Drass, cold desert in Western Himalaya, and its comparison with Antarctic and Arctic

“…The Karakoram range blocks most of the monsoon bearing clouds, making the region arid (Namgail 2009). Based on the cloning-based cultivation-independent methods Srinivas et al 2011;Kistler et al 2013), recent studies have reported the bacterial diversity of Himalayan regions. Though cloning-based cultivation-independent approaches overcome the limitations of cultivation-based methods, owing to the methodology-based bias, e.g., PCR and sequencing depth (Vaz-Moreira et al 2011), these techniques are not efficient enough to catalog the rare microbial taxons.…”

Psychrobacter glaciei sp. nov., isolated from the ice core of an Arctic glacier

“…Although Psychrobacter species have a global distribution, they are most frequently found in cold and other non-polar environments of low water activity (Rodrigues et al, 2009). At the time of writing, the genus contained 37 species with validly published names, among which at least 18 species were isolated from low-temperature environments, including Antarctic glacier mud and sediment (Bozal et al, 2003), Antarctic ornithogenic soils (Bowman et al, 1996), sea ice (Romanenko et al, 2004), alpine soil (Srinivas et al, 2011), Siberian permafrost (Bakermans et al, 2006) and Arctic seawater (Zeng et al, 2015). In this study, we report the detailed taxonomic characterization of one Psychrobacter-like bacterial strain, BIc20019 T .…”