title: The Santa Pola saltern as a model for studying the microbiota of hypersaline environments.
abstract: Multi-pond salterns constitute an excellent model for the study of the microbial diversity and ecology of hypersaline environments, showing a wide range of salt concentrations, from seawater to salt saturation. Accumulated studies on the Santa Pola (Alicante, Spain) multi-pond solar saltern during the last 35 years include culture-dependent and culture-independent molecular methods and metagenomics more recently. These approaches have permitted to determine in depth the microbial diversity of the ponds with intermediate salinities (from 10% salts) up to salt saturation, with haloarchaea and bacteria as the two main dominant groups. In this review, we describe the main results obtained using the different methodologies, the most relevant contributions for understanding the ecology of these extreme environments and the future perspectives for such studies.
authors.affiliation: Department of Microbiology and Parasitology, Faculty of Pharmacy, University of Sevilla, 41012, Sevilla, Spain, ventosa@us.es.
authors.forename: Antonio
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ventosa
authors.forename: Ana Beatriz
authors.initials: AB
authors.lastname: Fernández
authors.forename: María José
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: León
authors.forename: Cristina
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Sánchez-Porro
authors.forename: Francisco
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Rodriguez-Valera
mesh_terms: D054892:Metagenome; D064307:Microbiota; D061005:Ponds / Q000737:chemistry / Q000382:microbiology* / Q000821:virology; D054712:Salinity; D055049:Salt Tolerance