High altitude, hyper-arid soils of the Central-Andes harbor mega-diverse communities of actinobacteria

Abstract

The data reported in this paper are among the first relating to the microbiology of hyper-arid, very high altitude deserts and they provide base line information on the structure of actinobacterial communities. The high mountain Cerro Chajnantor landscape of the Central Andes in northern Chile is exposed to the world’s most intense levels of solar radiation and its impoverished soils are severely desiccated. The purpose of this research was to define the actinobacterial community structures in soils at altitudes ranging from 3000 to 5000 m above sea level. Pyrosequencing surveys have revealed an extraordinary degree of microbial dark matter at these elevations that includes novel candidate actinobacterial classes, orders and families. Ultraviolet-B irradiance and a range of edaphic factors were found to be highly significant in determining community compositions at family and genus levels of diversity.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s00792-017-0976-5) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Extreme environments: microbiology leading to specialized metabolites

“…Substantial improvements in the taxonomic approach to drug discovery can be expected given developments in the classification and identification of eukaryotes and prokaryotes driven by advances in whole‐genome sequencing procedures and associated improvements in bioinformatics as exemplified by Nouiou et al . (), increased understanding of the extent of microbial diversity in natural habitats (Bull et al ) coupled with developments designed to provide chemical dereplication (Bull and Goodfellow ).…”

“…Actinobacteria that are amycelial or form rudimentary hyphae have received less attention though they are known to be common in desert soils (Idris et al 2017b;Bull et al 2018b). Members of the family Geodermatophilaceae have received the most attention, notably the genera Blastococcus, Geodermatophilus and Modestobacter; members of these taxa are known to be resistant to desiccation, ionizing radiation, UV-light and heavy metals (Sghaier et al 2016 (Thumar et al 2010).…”

Dark, rare and inspirational microbial matter in the extremobiosphere: 16 000 m of bioprospecting campaigns

“…Culture-based surveys of recent years have reported members of over 23 validly named genera and many new and putatively new species have been highlighted including ones belonging to the poorly studied genera Actinomadura, Cryptosporangium, Kribbela, Nonomuraea, Pseudonocardia and Saccharothrix [26,27]. However, it is only from the results of metagenomic surveys that the spectacular extent of actinobacterial diversity in Atacama habitats has been fully recognised [28,29]. The data in Table 2 show the massive extent of actinobacterial dark matter existing at suprageneric ranks while at the genus rank 234 and 297 phylotypes were detected at low and high altitude sites, respectively.…”

Modestobacter altitudinis sp. nov., a novel actinobacterium isolated from Atacama Desert soil

“…excelsi' [3]. These results go someway towards accounting for the high numbers of Geodermatophilaceae propagules present in Atacama Desert habitats where extreme environmental conditions prevail [11,19]. Indeed, these data lend support to the view that the competitive success of these organisms in extreme, sparsely populated biomes may be a function of stress resistance not antibiosis [12].…”