Biodiversity of prokaryotic microflora in El Golea Salt lake, Algerian Sahara

The Algerian Sahara consists of numerous ecosystems including extreme environments in which the microbial diversity has not been characterized. We studied the bacterial and archaeal communities in the shallow salt lake of El Golea and established their distribution with respect to different physico-chemical characteristics like salinity gradients and types of wastewater pollutants. Pollution and salinity were negatively correlated. The four sampling sites studied are inhabited by microbial populations well adapted to the specific physical and nutritional conditions of each site. Extreme halophilic organisms, particularly archaea, were recovered from site 4, which contained up to 290 g/l NaCl, whereas halotolerant bacteria were isolated from the three other sampling sites, which contained NaCl concentrations from 6 to 36 g/l.