Ubiquitousness of and Carotenoid Producing Genes in Arabian Sea Coastal Biosystems of India.

This study presents a comparative analysis of halophiles from the global open sea and coastal biosystems through shotgun metagenomes ( = 209) retrieved from public repositories. The open sea was significantly enriched with and . Meanwhile, coastal biosystems were dominated by and . Halophilic archaea and , predominant in the coastal biosystem, were significantly ( < 0.05) enriched in coastal biosystems compared to the open sea. Analysis of whole genomes ( = 23,540), retrieved from EzBioCloud, detected in 64.66% of genomes, while was observed in 1.69% Bacteria and 40.75% Archaea. We further confirmed the viability and carotenoid pigment production by pure culture isolation ( = 1351) of extreme halophiles from sediments ( = 410 × 3) sampling at the Arabian coastline of India. All red-pigmented isolates were represented exclusively by , resistant to saturated NaCl (6 M), and had >60% G + C content. Multidrug resistance to tetracycline, gentamicin, ampicillin, and chloramphenicol were also observed. Our study showed that coastal biosystems could be more suited for bioprospection of halophiles rather than the open sea.