Abstract
The current study deals with the diversity and distribution of culturable cold-adapted bacteria in Himalayan Thajwas glacial soil. The total bacterial count of the seven soil samples collected near glacier snout at different altitudes was investigated through a culture-dependent method. The highest cfu/g (6.8±2 × 107) was recorded at site I, and the lowest cfu/g (4.6±2 × 103) was recorded at site VII on nutrient agar (NA) media. The 31 isolated strains were identified using 16S rRNA gene sequencing. Based on their optimum growth at different temperatures, these bacterial isolates were categorized into two overlap** groups: psychrophiles (optimum growth ≥15°C) and psychrotrophs (optimum growth ≥20°C). Besides, these bacterial strains were screened for their cold-active enzyme activity. Further, the microbial diversity was affected by higher incubation temperature, which reduced the richness due to the selection of psychrotrophic microorganisms. Variation in microbial diversity may be related to soil physicochemical properties since a high positive correlation was observed with water content, total nitrogen and organic carbon. This is the first research to look at microbial communities from the Thajwas Glacier, and it adds to our knowledge of the microbial diversity found in Himalayan cold ecosystems.
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Data availability
Data about the 16S rRNA gene sequences have been deposited at NCBI GenBank under the accession numbers: MN102377-91, MT478140, MT478142-50, MT477765, MT478875, and MT495407-10.
Code availability
Not applicable.
Abbreviations
- BLAST:
-
Basic Local Alignment Search Tool
- CFU:
-
Colony forming units
- CMC:
-
Carboxymethyl cellulose sodium salt
- DNA:
-
Deoxyribonucleic acid
- MEGA:
-
Molecular Evolutionary Genetic Analysis
- NA:
-
Nutrient agar
- NCBI:
-
National Center for Biotechnology Information
- OGT:
-
Optimum growth temperature
- PAST:
-
PAleontological Statistics
- PCR:
-
Polymerase chain reaction
- R2A:
-
Reasoner’s 2 agar
- rRNA:
-
Ribosomal Ribonucleic acid
- SPSS:
-
Statistical Package for the Social Sciences
- USA:
-
United States of America
- WCA:
-
Whole colony appearance
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SF framed the work design, collected, compiled and interpreted the data. Further, conducted experiments, wrote the manuscript and designed the figures. RN designed the research work, evaluated the data and did the revision of the manuscript. BAG and HM did the critical revision of the manuscript. GJD helped in statistical analysis. Both RN and BAG helped in designing the experiments and supervised the overall work. All the authors helped in writing the manuscript and provided critical feedback.
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Farooq, S., Nazir, R., Ganai, B.A. et al. Psychrophilic and psychrotrophic bacterial diversity of Himalayan Thajwas glacial soil, India. Biologia 77, 203–213 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11756-021-00915-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11756-021-00915-6