Overview of the Diversity of Extremely Saline Soils from a Semi-Arid Region Using 16S rRNA Gene Sequencing: A Case Study of the Sebkhas in Algerian High Plateaus

Abstract: Sebkha is an Arabic word referring to a closed ground depression temporarily occupied by a salt lake. Very few studies on the composition of the microbial communities from these ecosystems in the Algerian High Plateaus have been carried out. To fill this gap, four sebkhas in the eastern High Plateaus of two different Algerian provinces were sampled, in the winter 2020. We employed the 16S rRNA amplicon sequencing to understand the distribution and diversity of prokaryotic communities in these hypersaline soils. Our results indicate that the overall archaeal community in the hypersaline soils was dominated by members of the class Halobacteria followed by members of the yet uncultured phyla Hadarchaeota and Nanohaloarchaeota. Among the bacterial classes, Alphaproteobacteria was by far the most frequently recovered from all samples, whereas the Cyanobacteria phylum dominated in one of the sebkhas. It was evident from data that Halorubrum and Halapricum were the most abundant archaeal genera, whilst Rhodovibrio and Limimonas predominated among Bacteria, and these were present in all samples. Remarkably, the most abundant archaeal OTUs belonged to the families Haloarculaceae (16.6%) and Halobacteriaceae (16.3%).