Okoro Chinyere K, Brown Roselyn, Jones Amanda L, Andrews Barbara A, Asenjo Juan A, Goodfellow Michael, Bull Alan T
School of Biology, University of Newcastle, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE1 7RU, UK.
Antonie Van Leeuwenhoek. 2009 Feb;95(2):121-33. doi: 10.1007/s10482-008-9295-2. Epub 2008 Dec 4.
The Atacama Desert presents one of the most extreme environments on Earth and we report here the first extensive isolations of actinomycetes from soils at various locations within the Desert. The use of selective isolation procedures enabled actinomycetes to be recovered from arid, hyper-arid and even extreme hyper-arid environments in significant numbers and diversity. In some cases actinomycetes were the only culturable bacteria to be isolated under the conditions of this study. Phylogenetic analysis and some phenotypic characterisation revealed that the majority of isolates belonged to members of the genera Amycolatopsis, Lechevalieria and Streptomyces, a high proportion of which represent novel centres of taxonomic variation. The results of this study support the view that arid desert soils constitute a largely unexplored repository of novel bacteria, while the high incidence of non-ribosomal peptide synthase genes in our isolates recommend them as promising material in screening for new bioactive natural products.
阿塔卡马沙漠是地球上最极端的环境之一，我们在此报告首次从该沙漠不同地点的土壤中广泛分离出放线菌。使用选择性分离程序能够从干旱、超干旱甚至极端超干旱环境中大量且多样地回收放线菌。在某些情况下，放线菌是本研究条件下唯一可培养的细菌。系统发育分析和一些表型特征表明，大多数分离株属于拟无枝酸菌属、勒氏菌属和链霉菌属的成员，其中很大一部分代表了新的分类变异中心。本研究结果支持这样一种观点，即干旱沙漠土壤构成了一个很大程度上未被探索的新型细菌库，而我们分离株中非核糖体肽合成酶基因的高发生率表明它们是筛选新的生物活性天然产物的有前景的材料。
