Description of Microbial Communities of Extreme Halophilic Environment by a Metagenomic Approach

Abstract

Advances in next generation sequencing technologies have brought a paradigm shift in how scientific researchers investigate microbial ecology. Whole Genome Sequencing (WGS) allows to comprehensively study, in a single experiment, coding variations of a bacterial genome. My PhD thesis focuses on the use of 16s rRNA amplicon and metagenomics approaches to study the microbial diversity in hypersaline soils. First, I present the characterization of the soil where I prove a correlation between the various physic-chemical parameters measured and between them and the bacterial diversity. I then describe the bacterial composition using the next generation technology coupled with bioinformatics processes in order to obtain taxonomic compositions and functional dynamics of each sebkhas where the used metagenomics approach plays an important role in elucidating the identification of thegenes catalog and searching for enzymes and molecules that are likely to be exploited in a biotechnological process.