Abstract

There’re many kinds of extremely halophilic archaea living in salt lakes all over the world and the ecological environment of lakes can affect their archaeal species. To illustrate the relationships between archaeal species and salt lake environment, we isolated and cultured 25 extremely halophilic archaeal strains from three salt lakes in China (Gou Salt Lake, Huama Salt Lake and Yuncheng Salt Lake). According to the 16S rRNA gene sequence analysis and the construction of Neighbor-Joining phylogenetic trees, the isolates were closely related to each other. The most dominant archaea was genus halorubrum (88.0%), followed by genus haloarcula (8.0%) and a small amount of genus halovivax (4.0%). Yuncheng salt lake (YC) had the most abundant number of species. Through the study of the basic information of the three sampling sites, we considered the species of extremely halophilic archaea were related to their living natural conditions of brine. Warm weather and high mineralization degree are likely to be functional components to enrich the species diversity.

Keywords: Salt lakes; Halophilic archaea; 16S rDNA; PCR; Phylogenetic tree