Nodulation of by in an Abandonned Lead Mine Soils in Eastern Morocco.

Millions tons of lead and zinc wastes from the abandoned Touissit mine are stored in the open air as dikes in the vicinity of the villages in Eastern Morocco and pose a real danger to both the environment and local populations. To prevent the movement of minerals to the nearby villages and limit the damages to the environment and health, we proposed the nitrogen-fixing leguminous shrub , as a model plant to use for phytostabilization experimentations. This plant species is known by its ability to grow in hard climatic conditions and in heavy metals contaminated soils. The isolation of bacterial strains nodulating in the abandoned mine soils will permit the selection of rhizobia to inoculate young plant seedlings before their use for the phytostabilization of the mine tailings. In this work, 44 bacteria were isolated from the root nodules of grown in the Touissit abandoned mine. Twenty-four isolates were considered as true rhizobia as they possess a copy of the nodC symbiotic gene and were able to renodulate their original host. The phenotypic characterization showed that all the strains are tolerant to different concentrations of heavy metals. The analysis of the 16S rRNA sequences of two selected representative strains showed they were related to different strains of isolated from different legumes in three continents deserts. The , , and housekeeping genes analysis confirmed the affiliation of the strains to . Moreover, the phylogenic analysis of , , and symbiotic genes showed that the strains are more related to JNVUTP6 species isolated from root nodules in the Thar Desert in India. To our knowledge, this is the first report about the isolation of from root nodules.