Polymerase chain reaction-based screening method applicable universally to environmental haloarchaea and halobacteria for identifying polyhydroxyalkanoate producers among them.

The existing techniques for detection of polyhydroxyalkanoates (PHA) in halophilic archaea/bacteria are either imprecise or require prior PHA production before screening. The proposed method involves amplification of the approximately 280-300 bp conserved region of Class III PHA synthase (phaC) gene of halophiles using the primers codehopCF and codehopCR (Han et al. Appl Environ Microb 76:7811-7819, 2010). In this study, the best reaction condition was ascertained after repeated trials. This developed method was tested on nine haloarchaeal and halobacterial type strains and 28 environmental halophilic archaea and bacteria isolated from the salt pans of the east and west coasts of India. 29 strains were found to be phaC-positive, while eight were found to be phaC-negative although they appeared PHA positive through conventional Nile Red staining. 16S rRNA-based phylogenetic analysis identified 9 haloarchaeal and 9 halobacterial species as novel PHA producers. Multiple sequence alignment of the phaC gene-derived amino acid sequences showed that only 7 amino acid residues were conserved within all four classes of phaC enzymes, whereas 61 amino acids were identical among the phaC enzyme specific to the haloarchaeal and halobacterial strains presently investigated. All phaC-positive strains produced PHA in standard nutrient deficient medium, whereas the phaC-negative strains did not accumulate any PHA as detected by gas chromatography and nuclear magnetic resonance analyses, thus proving the precision of the developed method and elimination of false positives seen with the traditional Nile Red staining procedure.