Profiling the genes associated with osmoadaptation and their variation by seasonally in Tuz Lake

Abstract

Hypersaline environments are one of the extreme habitats in the world. Microorganisms living in a hypersaline environment have developed various molecular adaptation strategies to overcome these extreme conditions. The study aims to investigate the genes associated with osmoadaptation seasonal variation in Tuz Lake by PICRUSt2. Dada2 pipelines were applied for filtering, dereplication, chimera identification, and merging paired-end reads to construct table.qza and rep_seqs.qza files. Therefore, the PICRUSt2 was applied to analyze the metabolic function of archaeal and bacterial diversity in Tuz Lake by using table.qza and rep_seqs.qza files. As a result of metabolic functions based on 16S rDNA amplicon data, the genes related to potassium accumulation played an important role in osmoregulation in Tuz Lake, where the archaea population was dominant. Furthermore, bacteriorhodopsin, halorhodopsin, and sensory rhodopsin functions were determined. The abundance of bacteriorhodopsin and halorhodopsin were increased in summer and spring, respectively.