MORPHOLOGICAL AND PHYLOGENETIC DIVERSITY OF CYANOBACTERIA IN FOUR HOT SPRINGS OF IRAN

Hot springs have been a subject of intense discussion for biologists in the last decades. Thermophilic cyanobacteria are scientifically valuable for their analogy to the ancient life forms on earth and also as a source of thermostable biocompounds. Exploration of their biodiversity is an important step towards these goals. In a revision of the cyanobacteria in hot springs of Iran, four hot springs in the Hormozgan (Bandar Abbas) and Mazandaran provinces of Iran were sampled from October 2011 to July 2012. In total 43 species belonging to 20 genera, 11 families and 5 orders of the planktonic cyanobacteria were identified. Among these taxa Chroococcus with 7, Oscillatoria and Phormidium with 5 species found to be more predominant and noticeable among other genera. All of these taxa are new records for studied hot springs. We developed a combined molecular and morphological approach to identification of cyanobacteria. In this study seventeen populations and 13 morphological characters were analyzed. Molecular study based on 16S rRNA gene sequence does not disrupt morphological information and it confirms the separation of studied taxa according to morphological characters.