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Lookup NU author(s): Hamidah Idris, Professor Michael Goodfellow, Dr Roy SandersonORCiD, Professor Alan Bull
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
© 2017 The Author(s). The Atacama Desert is the most extreme non-polar biome on Earth, the core region of which is considered to represent the dry limit for life and to be an analogue for Martian soils. This study focused on actinobacteria because they are keystone species in terrestrial ecosystems and are acknowledged as an unrivalled source of bioactive compounds. Metagenomic analyses of hyper-arid and extreme hyper-arid soils in this desert revealed a remarkable degree of actinobacterial 'dark matter', evidenced by a detected increase of 34% in families against those that are validly published. Rank-abundance analyses indicated that these soils were high-diversity habitats and that the great majority of designated 'rare' genera (up to 60% of all phylotypes) were always rare. These studies have enabled a core actinobacterial microbiome common to both habitats to be defined. The great majority of detected taxa have not been recovered by culture dependent methods, neither, with very few exceptions, has their functional ecology been explored. A microbial seed bank of this magnitude has significance not just for Atacama soil ecosystem resilience but represents an enormous untapped resource for biotechnology discovery programmes in an era where resistance to existing antibiotics is rapidly becoming a major threat to global health.
Author(s): Idris H, Goodfellow M, Sanderson R, Asenjo JA, Bull AT
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Scientific Reports
Year: 2017
Volume: 7
Issue: 1
Online publication date: 21/08/2017
Acceptance date: 04/07/2017
Date deposited: 18/10/2017
ISSN (electronic): 2045-2322
Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-017-08937-4
DOI: 10.1038/s41598-017-08937-4
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