Bacterial diversity of Drass, cold desert in Western Himalaya, and its comparison with Antarctic and Arctic.

Drass is the coldest inhabited place in India and the second coldest, inhabited place in the world, after Siberia. Using the 16SrDNA amplicon pyrosequencing, bacterial diversity patterns were cataloged across the Drass cold desert. In order to identify the ecotype abundance across cold desert environment, bacterial diversity patterns of Drass were further compared with the bacterial diversity of two other cold deserts, i.e., Antarctic and Arctic. Acidobacteria, Proteobacteria, Actinobacteria, Bacteroidetes, Cyanobacteria and Gemmatimonadetes were among the highly abundant taxonomic groups present across all the three cold deserts and were designated as the core phyla. However, Firmicutes, Nitrospirae, Armatimonadetes (former candidate division OP10), Planctomycetes, TM7, Chloroflexi, Deinococcus-Thermus, Tenericutes and candidate phyla WS3 were identified as rare phyla in Drass, Antarctic and Arctic samples. Differential abundance patterns were also computed across all the three samples, i.e., Acidobacteria (32.1 %) were dominant in Drass and Firmicutes (52.9 ± 17.6 %) and Proteobacteria (42 ± 1.3 %) were dominant in Antarctic and Arctic reference samples, respectively. Alpha diversity values Shannon's (H) and Simpson's (1-D) diversity indices were highest for Antarctic samples, whereas richness estimators (ACE and Chao1) were maximum for Drass soil suggesting greater species richness in bacterial communities in Drass than the Antarctic and Arctic samples.