2026-10-06T14:38:40Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/32588802 2026-10-02T00:11:23Z category_24358 category_24208 category_24310 item_type_3 month_year_10_2026

Taxonomic and Stress-Response Genomic Profiles Link Geographically Distant Hypersaline Microbes Scripts and Datasets Jaclyn Winter (19139749) Elijah Bring Horvath (19013685) William Brazelton (740292) Microbial ecology Bioinformatics and computational biology not elsewhere classified Genomics metagneomics heavy metals extremophiles microbial ecology genomics comparative metagenomics <p dir="ltr">Extreme hypersaline environments impose overlapping physiochemical stresses on microbial communities, but whether geographically distant systems develop common taxonomic and genomic features remains poorly understood. Here, we reconstructed 164 medium- to high-quality metagenome-assembled genomes from Great Salt Lake sediments and compared them with >7,000 publicly available genomes representing 69 additional regional populations spanning freshwater, marine, soil, sediment, saline, hypersaline, and heavy metal-impacted environments. Despite broad taxonomic variation, Great Salt Lake consistently clustered most closely with hypersaline sediment communities from Oman across multiple taxonomic ranks, with Kulunda Steppe, Russia, forming a broader associated group. Importantly, this relationship extended beyond taxonomy; Great Salt Lake and Oman also showed similar distributions of genes associated with heavy metal homeostasis, detoxification, efflux, and osmotic and oxidative stress, and their association was recovered in finer-scale biosynthetic gene cluster profiles. However, when stress-response genes were grouped into broader mechanistic categories, Great Salt Lake and Oman no longer clustered together, revealing regional differences in the proportional representation of stress-response strategies. Stress-response regulatory potential also differed across environments, with ArsR-family regulators enriched among soil, sediment, saline, and hypersaline populations and MerR-family regulators more highly represented among freshwater and marine populations. Together, these findings show that geographically distant hypersaline sediment communities can share recurring taxonomic and genomic features while retaining distinct functional genomic profiles consistent with region-specific selective pressures.</p> 2026-10-02T00:11:23Z Dataset Dataset 10.6084/m9.figshare.32588802.v3 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/Taxonomic_and_Stress-Response_Genomic_Profiles_Link_Geographically_Distant_Hypersaline_Microbes_Scripts_and_Datasets/32588802 CC BY 4.0