Diversity of extremely halophilic cultivable prokaryotes in Mediterranean, Atlantic and Pacific solar salterns: evidences that unexplored sites constitute sources of cultivable novelty. Halophilic cultivable prokaryotes in solar salterns: evidences that unexplored sites constitute souces of cultiva

The culturable fraction of aerobic, heterotrophic and extremely halophilic microbiota retrieved from sediment and brine samples of eight sampling sites in the Mediterranean, Canary Islands and Chile has been studied by means of a tandem approach combining high throughput cultivation, MALDI-TOF MS targeting whole cell biomass, and phylogenetic reconstruction based on 16S rRNA gene analysis. The approach allowed the identification of more than 4200 strains and comparison among different sampling sites. The results indicate that the approach constitutes an excellent tool for the discovery of taxonomic novelty. We could identify 4 new genera and 9 new species within the family Halobacteriaceae, 1 new bacterial species, as well as successfully bring to pure culture a representative of Salinibacter ruber phylotype II that had been refractory to be brought into culture for the last fifteen years. Altogether the results indicate that in order to have better yields on the retrieval of novel taxa from the environment it is recommended to perform non-redundant environment sampling together with the screening of large sets of strains.