Laguna Brava microbial mats

Atacama region in Chile is one of the most arid locations in the world. Extreme conditions in the area include: high UV irradiation, hypersalinity, drastic temperature changes, and desiccation. Hypersaline lakes can be found in this environment, and therein, bacterial communities thrive, forming different structures and colonizing varied niches. Given that the conditions in the lakes have important seasonal changes, including mainly temperature and dissecation, it is interesting to study the composition and evolution of these communities, and also its influence in the biogeochemical setting. In these datasets bacterial diversity was assessed by pyrosequencing V4 region of 16S rRNA gene in microbial mats and microbialites from lake Brava.