User:Floydnichols2025

Overview

By: Floyd Nichols

The Great Salt Lake is located in Utah and is a highly saline Lake (Post, 1977). The Great Salt Lake is a remnant of a prehistoric freshwater lake, which has turned saline because of the blocked rainfall from the Sierra Nevada (Post, 1977). Furthermore, it is unique in that it the Lake shows an increasing salinity gradient from south to north, ranging from seawater concentrations to saturation, respectively (Weimer et al., 2009). Despite these high saline conditions, Great Salt Lake still shows high biodiversity, (Weimer et al., 2009; Tazi et al., 2014). Considering the extreme nature of this environment, many of the microorganisms are novel and uncultured; however, as the environment might suggest, the large majority of phyla that inhabit the Great Salt Lake are halotolerant and halophiles (Tazi et al., 2014). Interestingly, although living in highly saline environments such as the Great Salt Lake comes at an energetic cost, bacteria in this environment are less likely to be dormant (Aanderud et al., 2016). This suggests that saline environments act to filter structuring bacteria in lake ecosystems (Aanderud et al., 2016). Similarly, high primary productivity and high sulfate concentrations are associated with the Great Salt Lake as well as other hypersaline environments (Kjeldsen et al., 2007). Despite the information that has been obtained for microbial communities in the Great Salt Lake and other hypersaline environments, they still remain understudied.

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