Extracellular dissolved DNA has been demonstrated to be present in many terrestrial and aquatic environments, actively secreted, or released by decaying cells. Free DNA has the genetic potential to be acquired...
Authors: Sara Borin, Elena Crotti, Francesca Mapelli, Isabella Tamagnini, Cesare Corselli and Daniele Daffonchio
The nitrogen cycle (N-cycle), principally supported by prokaryotes, involves different redox reactions mainly focused on assimilatory purposes or respiratory processes for energy conservation. As the N-cycle h...
Authors: María José Bonete, Rosa María Martínez-Espinosa, Carmen Pire, Basilio Zafrilla and David J Richardson
The deep-sea, hypersaline anoxic brine lakes in the Mediterranean are among the most extreme environments on earth, and in one of them, the MgCl2-rich Discovery basin, the presence of active microbes is equivocal...
Authors: Andrea M Sass, Boyd A McKew, Henrik Sass, Jörg Fichtel, Kenneth N Timmis and Terry J McGenity
In spite of considerable efforts over past decades we still know relatively little regarding the biogeography of rotifers of inland waters in México. To help rectify this we undertook an extensive survey of th...
Authors: Elizabeth J Walsh, Thomas Schröder, Robert L Wallace, Judith V Ríos-Arana and Roberto Rico-Martínez
Compatible solutes are small organic osmolytes including but not limited to sugars, polyols, amino acids, and their derivatives. They are compatible with cell metabolism even at molar concentrations. A variety...
The consistent use of the taxonomic system of binomial nomenclature (genus and species) was first popularized by Linnaeus nearly three-hundred years ago to classify mainly plants and animals. His main goal was...
The moderate halophile Halobacillus halophilus is the paradigm for chloride dependent growth in prokaryotes. Recent experiments shed light on the molecular basis of the chloride dependence that is reviewed here. ...
The Northern Great Plains of Canada are home to numerous permanent and ephemeral athalassohaline lakes. These lakes display a wide range of ion compositions, salinities, stratification patterns, and ecosystems...
Halophiles are found in all three domains of life. Within the Bacteria we know halophiles within the phyla Cyanobacteria, Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, Actinobacteria, Spirochaetes, and Bacteroidetes. Within the Ar...
Cyanobacteria are ancient life forms and have adapted to a variety of extreme environments, including high salinity. Biochemical, physiological and genetic studies have contributed to uncovering their underlyi...
Authors: Jagroop Pandhal, Phillip C Wright and Catherine A Biggs
The model halophile Halobacterium sp. NRC-1 was among the first Archaea to be completely sequenced and many post-genomic tools, including whole genome DNA microarrays are now being applied to its analysis. This e...
Authors: James A Coker, Priya DasSarma, Jeffrey Kumar, Jochen A Müller and Shiladitya DasSarma
Lake Urmia (or Ormiyeh) is one of the largest hypersaline lakes in the world and the habitat of a unique bisexual Artemia species (A. urmiana). Despite this, and several other values of the lake, little literatur...
Pogonus littoralis and Pogonus chalceus are very close related species with quite different ecological preferences within salt marshes. We study the evolutionary processes in and between these presumably young sp...
Authors: Hilde Dhuyvetter, Jean-Pierre Maelfait and Konjev Desender
Hortaea werneckii is one of the most salt-tolerant species among microorganisms. It has been isolated from hypersaline waters of salterns as one of the predominant species of a group of halophilic and halotoleran...
Authors: Metka Lenassi, Tomaz Vaupotic, Nina Gunde-Cimerman and Ana Plemenitas
Most of the haloarchaeal strains have been isolated from hypersaline environments such as solar evaporation ponds, salt lakes, or salt deposits, and they, with some exceptions, lyse or lose viability in very l...
Authors: Tadamasa Fukushima, Ron Usami and Masahiro Kamekura
Saline Systems is a journal devoted to both basic and applied studies of saline and hypersaline environments and their biodiversity. Here, I review the reports and commentaries published in the journal in 2006, i...
Nutrient loadings from its catchment upon The Fleet, a highly valuable coastal lagoon in Southern England, were hindcast for the period AD 1866–2004, using a catchment model, export coefficients, and historica...
Authors: Geraint J Weber, Patrick E O'Sullivan and Paul Brassley
Biodiversity can be measured at different hierarchical levels, from genetic diversity within species to diversity of ecosystems, though policy-makers tend to use species richness. The 2010 goal of reducing bio...
Authors: Gonzalo M Gajardo, Patrick Sorgeloos and John A Beardmore
A preliminary biometric and ecologic database for the brine shrimp Artemia from Mexico and Chile is presented. The area abounds in small and seasonal ponds and large inland lakes, the latter mainly located in Mex...
Authors: Thalía B Castro, Gonzalo Gajardo, Jorge M Castro and Germán M Castro
This study investigates the relationship between salinity and biotic communities (primary producers and macroinvertebrates) in Rambla Salada, a Mediterranean hypersaline stream in SE Spain. Since the 1980's, t...
Authors: Josefa Velasco, Andrés Millán, Juan Hernández, Cayetano Gutiérrez, Pedro Abellán, David Sánchez and Mar Ruiz
Sequenced archaeal genomes contain a variety of bacterial and eukaryotic DNA repair gene homologs, but relatively little is known about how these microorganisms actually perform DNA repair. At least some archa...
Authors: David J Crowley, Ivan Boubriak, Brian R Berquist, Monika Clark, Emily Richard, Lynn Sullivan, Shiladitya DasSarma and Shirley McCready
Sodium/proton-antiporters (Nha) are known to play an important role in pH- and Na+-homeostasis. In microorganisms several types with different capacity, affinity and selectivity for Na+ and Li+ exist. The homeost...
Authors: Matthias Kurz, Anika NS Brünig and Erwin A Galinski
Urmia Lake has been designated as an international park by the United Nations. The lake occupies a 5700 km2 depression in northwestern Iran. Thirteen permanent rivers flow into the lake. Water level in the lak...
The equatorial Pacific Ocean atoll islands of Kiritimati and Teraina encompass great physical, chemical and biological variability within extreme lacustrine environments. Surveys of lake chemistry and sediment...
Authors: Casey Saenger, Michael Miller, Rienk H Smittenberg and Julian P Sachs
Salt stress is one of the most serious factors limiting the productivity of rice, the staple diet in many countries. Gibberellic acid has been reported to reduce NaCl-induced growth inhibition in some plants i...
Authors: AA Rodríguez, AM Stella, MM Storni, G Zulpa and MC Zaccaro
The XI International Rotifer Symposium was held during 11–18 March, 2006 at the National Autonomous University of Mexico Campus Iztacala located at the North Mexico City (Mexico). These triennial international...
The Salton Sea (SS) is the largest inland body of water in California: surface area 980 km2, volume 7.3 million acre-feet, 58 km long, 14–22 km wide, maximum depth 15 m. Located in the southeastern Sonoran desert...
Possession of gas vesicles is generally considered to be advantageous to halophilic archaea: the vesicles are assumed to enable the cells to float, and thus reach high oxygen concentrations at the surface of t...
Authors: Aharon Oren, Nuphar Pri-El, Orr Shapiro and Nachshon Siboni
Halobacteriumsp. NRC-1 is an extremely halophilic archaeon that is easily cultured and genetically tractable. Since its genome sequence was completed in 2000, a combination of genetic, transcriptomic, proteomic...
Authors: Shiladitya DasSarma, Brian R Berquist, James A Coker, Priya DasSarma and Jochen A Müller
Caribbean salt ponds are unique wetlands that have received little scientific attention. They are common features of dry Caribbean coastlines, but they are threatened by rapid coastal development. We compared ...
On the 4th of July, 2005, the Saline Systems editorial group launched the new online open access journal, Saline Systems, with BioMed Central as the publisher. The scope of the journal includes both basic and app...
The 9th International Conference on Salt Lake Research was held 26–30 September 2005 in Western Australia at the Curtin University of Technology, Perth, Australia. One hundred scientists from 10 countries pres...
This is the first in a series of experiments designed to characterize the Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge (SPNWR) ecosystem in northwestern Oklahoma and to catalogue its microbial inhabitants. The SPNWR i...
Authors: Kelly M Major, Andrea E Kirkwood, Clinton S Major, John W McCreadie and William J Henley
In much of the northern Great Plains, saline and hypersaline lacustrine brines are the only surface waters present. As a group, the lakes of this region are unique: there is no other area in the world that can...
Artemia (Crustacea, Anostraca), also known as brine shrimp, are typical inhabitants of extreme environments. These hypersaline environments vary considerably in their physicochemical composition, and even their c...
Authors: William N Camargo, Gabriel C Durán, Orlando C Rada, Licet C Hernández, Juan-Carlos G Linero, Igor M Muelle and Patrick Sorgeloos
Generally, extremophiles have been deemed to survive in the extreme environments to which they had adapted to grow. Recently many extremophiles have been isolated from places where they are not expected to gro...
Authors: Akinobu Echigo, Miki Hino, Tadamasa Fukushima, Toru Mizuki, Masahiro Kamekura and Ron Usami
Natural microbial communities are extremely complex and dynamic systems in terms of their population structure and functions. However, little is known about the in situ functions of the microbial communities.
Authors: Jinjun Kan, Thomas E Hanson, Joy M Ginter, Kui Wang and Feng Chen
The diversity of hypersaline environments and the physiology of representative organisms are only beginning to be understood. Recent progress in this area is documented in "Adaptation to life at high salt conc...
Microorganisms that adapt to moderate and high salt environments use a variety of solutes, organic and inorganic, to counter external osmotic pressure. The organic solutes can be zwitterionic, noncharged, or a...
A hundred years have passed since the description of the genus Dunaliella, the unicellular green alga which is responsible for most of the primary production in hypersaline environments worldwide. The present pap...
A variety of strategies for survival of UV irradiation are used by cells, ranging from repair of UV-damaged DNA, cell cycle arrest, tolerance of unrepaired UV photoproducts, and shielding from UV light. Some o...
Authors: Shirley McCready, Jochen A Müller, Ivan Boubriak, Brian R Berquist, Wooi Loon Ng and Shiladitya DasSarma
Freshwater anostracans inhabit ephemeral water bodies in which as the water level decreases due to evaporation the salt concentration increases. Thus, for most anostracans salinity becomes the major stress fac...
Authors: SSS Sarma, Lynda Beladjal, S Nandini, Gerardo Cerón-Martínez and Karina Tavera-Briseño
Saline Systems addresses the publication needs of scientists conducting basic and applied research on coastal and inland saline environments and their flora and fauna. The journal covers research at all levels, f...
