| diversity of culturable actinomycetes in hyper-arid soils of the atacama desert, chile. | the atacama desert presents one of the most extreme environments on earth and we report here the first extensive isolations of actinomycetes from soils at various locations within the desert. the use of selective isolation procedures enabled actinomycetes to be recovered from arid, hyper-arid and even extreme hyper-arid environments in significant numbers and diversity. in some cases actinomycetes were the only culturable bacteria to be isolated under the conditions of this study. phylogenetic a ... | 2009 | 19052913 |