Diversity of Moderate Halophilic bacteria from Sambhr Salt Lake

Halophiles are salt-loving organisms that inhabit hypersaline environments and are well equipped to balance the osmotic pressure of the environment and resist the denaturing effects of salts. Halophiles can be grouped as slightly, moderately or extremely halophilic, depending on their requirement for NaCl. Moderately halophilic bacteria are microorganisms able to grow optimally in media containing 3 to 15% (wt/vol) salts (Kushner, 1993). This group is very heterogeneous taxonomically and includes a great variety of species belonging to Archaea (Mathrani et al.,1988) and Bacteria (Ventosa, 1994). Halophiles are found distributed all over the world in hypersaline environments, many in natural hypersaline brines in arid, coastal, and even deep sea locations, as well as in artificial salterns used to mine salts from the sea. Their novel characteristics and capacity for large-scale culturing make halophiles potentially valuable for biotechnology (DasSarma and Arora (2001). Halophiles produce a large variety of stable and unique biomolecules including hydrolytic enzymes (Birgul Ozcan et al, 2009). Recent decades have seen a surge in studies on extreme environments including hypersaline ecosystems. Major emphasis is on identification of extremophiles based on both molecular and biochemical basis. ISSN: 2319-7706 Volume 3 Number 7 (2014) pp. 518-525 http://www.ijcmas.com