16S rRNA Gene Diversity in the Salt Crust of Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia, the World's Largest Salt Flat

Wolf T Pecher; Fabiana L Martínez; Priya DasSarma; Daniel Guzmán; Shiladitya DasSarma

doi:10.1128/MRA.00374-20

16S rRNA Gene Diversity in the Salt Crust of Salar de Uyuni, Bolivia, the World's Largest Salt Flat

Microbiol Resour Announc. 2020 May 21;9(21):e00374-20. doi: 10.1128/MRA.00374-20.

Authors

Wolf T Pecher^{1

2}, Fabiana L Martínez^{1

3}, Priya DasSarma¹, Daniel Guzmán⁴, Shiladitya DasSarma⁵

Affiliations

¹ Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
² Yale Gordon College of Arts and Sciences, University of Baltimore, Baltimore, Maryland, USA.
³ Instituto de Investigaciones para la Industria Química, Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas, Universidad Nacional de Salta, Salta, Argentina.
⁴ Centro de Biotecnología, Faculty of Sciences and Technology, Universidad Mayor de San Simón, Cochabamba, Bolivia.
⁵ Institute of Marine and Environmental Technology, Department of Microbiology and Immunology, University of Maryland School of Medicine, Baltimore, Maryland, USA sdassarma@som.umaryland.edu.

Abstract

Salar de Uyuni is a vast, high-altitude salt flat in Bolivia with extreme physico-geochemical properties approaching multiple limits of life. Evidence for diverse halophilic bacteria and archaea was found in its surface and near-surface salt crust using 16S amplicon analysis, providing a snapshot of prokaryotic life.