Microbial communities of the Aral Sea - Metabarcoding

The desiccation of the Aral Sea represents one of the largest man-made environmental regional disasters requiring immense restoration efforts. Here we investigated bacterial and archaeal communities in the rhizosphere of pioneer plants in comparison to the salt- and toxin-enriched bulk soil in the dried-up Aral Sea basin across a gradient of desiccation (5, 10, and 40 years) by a combined approach of qPCR analyses, amplicon and shotgun metagenome sequencing.