BACKGROUND The St. Lucia Estuary, Africa's largest estuarine lake, is currently experiencing unprecedented freshwater deprivation which has resulted in a northward gradient of drought effects, with hypersaline conditions in its northern lakes. METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS This study documents the changes that occurred in the biotic communities at False Bay from May 2010 to June 2011, in ord...

• We link homogeneous muds to overflows and turbidites debrites underflows. Overflows are more dominent in interglacials, underflows prominent glacials. Climate change affected the flows via changing salinity-density profile of lake brine. In lakes oceans, links between modern sediment density flow processes deposits preserved long-term geological records poorly understood. Consequently, it is ...

BACKGROUND 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 by living competent cells by horizontal gene transfer mediated by natural transformation. The aim of this work is to study the persistence of extracellular DNA and its biologic...

screening and identification of moderately halophilic protease producing bacteria from different regions of maharloo, a hypersaline lake in the southern area of iran, were the objectives of this study. in the preliminary screening, 16 isolates exhibited proteolytic activity on saline skim milk agar. all isolates were able to grow comfortably in the media containing 7-15% of salt. protease activ...

Bacterial and archaeal aerobic communities were recovered from sediments from the shallow El-Djerid salt lake in Tunisia, and their salinity gradient distribution was established. Six samples for physicochemical and microbiological analyses were obtained from 6 saline sites in the lake for physico-chemical and microbiological analyses. All samples studied were considered hypersaline with NaCl c...

On the Kiritimati atoll, several lakes exhibit microbial mat-formation under different hydrochemical conditions. Some of these lakes trigger microbialite formation such as Lake 21, which is an evaporitic, hypersaline lake (salinity of approximately 170‰). Lake 21 is completely covered with a thick multilayered microbial mat. This mat is associated with the formation of decimeter-thick highly po...

Lake Urmia in northwestern Iran is one of the hypersaline lakes of world. In the Urmia region a Cenozoic island arc was formed by northeastward subduction of Neo-Tethyan oceanic plate beneath central Iran; the lake is therefore located in the fore-arc basin tectonic setting. Satellite imagery of the Urmia region illustrates that the trend of faults are in two main NE-SW and NW-SE directions. Th...

Volatile halogenated organic compounds (VOX) contribute to ozone depletion and global warming. There is evidence of natural VOX formation in many environments ranging from forest soils to salt lakes. Laboratory studies have suggested that VOX formation can be chemically stimulated by reactive Fe species while field studies have provided evidence for direct biological (enzymatic) VOX formation. ...

Haloarchaea that inhabit Great Salt Lake (GSL), a thalassohaline terminal lake, must respond to the fluctuating climate conditions of the elevated desert of Utah. We investigated how shifting environmental factors, specifically salinity and temperature, affected gene expression in the GSL haloarchaea, NA6-27, which we isolated from the hypersaline north arm of the lake. Combined data from culti...