Running title: The bacterial ancestry of the Archaea. 2 The haloarchaea are aerobic, heterotrophic, photophosphorylating prokaryotes, whose supposed closest relatives and ancestors, the methanogens, are CO 2-reducing, anaerobic chemolithotrophs. Using two available haloarchaeal genomes we firstly confirmed the methanogenic ancestry of the group and then investigated those individual genes in th...

Halophilic archaebacteria (Haloarchaea) can survive extreme desiccation, starvation and radiation, sometimes apparently for millions of years. Several of the strategies that are involved appear specific for Haloarchaea (for example, the formation of halomucin, survival in fluid inclusions of halite), and some are known from other prokaryotes (dwarfing of cells, reduction of ATP). Several newly-...

Saturated thalassic brines are among the most physically demanding habitats on Earth: few microbes survive in them. Salinibacter ruber is among these organisms and has been found repeatedly in significant numbers in climax saltern crystallizer communities. The phenotype of this bacterium is remarkably similar to that of the hyperhalophilic Archaea (Haloarchaea). The genome sequence suggests tha...

Dimethylsulfoxide (DMSO) has long been known to support anaerobic respiration in a few species of basically aerobic extremely halophilic euryarchaea living hypersaline lakes. Recently, it also shown be utilized as an additional electron acceptor sulfur-reducing haloarchaea. Here we investigated whether haloarchaea would capable with other two sulfoxides, methionine sulfoxide (MSO) and tetrameth...

Five novel halophilic archaeal strains, named BND22 T , ZY10 ZY41 ZY58 and ZY43 were isolated from the coastal saline sediment of intertidal zone located in Qingdao natural sea salt produced Huanghua marine solar saltern, PRChina. These five strains demonstrated typical morphology growth characteristics haloarchaea. The comparison 16S rRNA gene revealed that strain BDN22 was associated with Sal...