Lonar soil diversity

The goal of the study was to bio-prospect bacteria from Lonar lake with meteorite impact origin and highly alkaline environment that harbors a plethora of diverse organisms. The aim was to detect culturable and unculturable bacterial diversity having the ability of biotransformation of arsenic as arsenic transforming microbial diversity from Lonar remains unexplored. As the culturable diversity at lab scale provided an exceptionally hypertolerant bacteria from the trivial arsenic containing Lonar Lake, the further aim was to explore the unculturable diversity for potential isolates with arsenic biotransformation ability. We also wanted to correlate the virtual functional/ imputed metagenomics and comment over the arsenic biogeochemical cycling in Lonar soil. Hence this study differs from the rest by providing unexplored arsenic diversity in Lonar soil and also relates and compares to the cultured diversity at the laboratory and further gives insights about the arsenic biogeochemical cycle in Lonar soil.