ABSTRACT
374While deserts account for 20% of the earth’s terrestrial surface, their microbial diversity is least explored. The haloalkaliphilic bacteria have attracted a great deal of attention in the past couple of decades. The dual extremities of the halophiles and alkaliphiles make these microorganisms quite interesting to study the adaptation, metabolism, and biotechnological avenues. The bacterial diversity has been explored from the saline Kutch Desert. Microbial community analysis has been carried out in other deserts of the world, such as Antacama Desert (Chile), Monegros Desert (Spain), Negev Desert (Israel), Gobi Desert (Mongolia), Taklamaken Desert (China), Sahara Desert (Africa), and Sonoran Desert (America). Majority of the haloalkaliphilic bacteria from the saline deserts produce extracellular enzymes and some display a high resistance against several antibiotics. Phenotypic characters of the bacteria can be used for the cluster analysis to group them into phenons using Jaccard similarity coefficient and Unweighted Pair Group Mean Averages (UPGMA) algorithm. The bacterial diversity is well judged by employing biphasic approaches based on the genotypic and phenotypic characteristics
