THE GENETIC HETEROGENEITY OF FACULTATIVE ALKALIPHILIC BACILLUS SPECIES ISOLATED FROM SODA LAKE.

In this study, the genotypic diversity of 26 Bacillus strains, including 24 facultative alkaliphilic isolates from the waters and surrounding soils of Lake Van, Turkey and 2 reference strains were investigated. Plasmid profiling and RAPD-PCR were used to determine the genetic variability of the isolates. The plasmid profiling analysis confirmed all the isolates had plasmids and 20 isolates were allocated into three major groups excluding the ones with unique plasmids. A total of six oligonucleotide primers were used for RAPD amplification, which generated a total of 505 fragments, all of them were polymorphic. A numerical analysis of the DNA band profiles with 6 different primers was generated by unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean (UPGMA). The genetic distances among the isolates using the primers M13-10, M13-14, OPL3, OPL12, RAPD12, and RPO2 were at percentage similarities between 16 to 100%, 12 to 100%, 28 to 94%, 4 to 100%, 31 to 100% and 8 to 80% respectively. The results of the study suggested that RAPD-PCR technique can provide rapid and efficient approach to solve taxonomic difficulties among the facultative alkaliphilic Bacillus isolates at the strain level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]