building the taxonomic profile of the riniaie marwah hot spring of kishtwar in jammu and kashmir: the first high-throughput sequencing-based metagenome study

Background and objectives: rinaie marwah hot spring kishtwar (rmhsk) is one of the geothermal springs located at 33°51′51′′n 75°32′07′′e with an elevation of 2134 meters above sea level in jammu and kashmir, india. we aimed to study the microbial diversity of this geothermal spring using metagenomics. materials and methods: in the present study, physiochemical parameters including temperature (65-75°c), ph (6. 9-8. 8), hardness (250 ppm), and mineral content was measured along with the microbial diversity using illumina miseq metage- nome-based 16s amplicon sequencing (v3-v4). the sequence reads were classified taxonomically into 31 phyla, 71 classes, 152 orders, 256 families, 410 genus, and 665 species. qiime 2 (quantitative insights into microbial ecology), an extensible, powerful, and decentralized analytical tool, was used for taxonomic analysis. results: bacteroidota (32. 57%) was the dominant phylum, bacteroidia (32. 51%) the dominant class, bacteroidales (16.6%) the dominant order, and lentimicrobiaceae (14. 23%) was the dominant family per the abundance analysis. shannon (2. 28) and chao 1 (87. 0) diversity indices support the existence of higher microbial diversity in rmhsk (50717 otus). conclusion: the microbial diversity of rmhsk is reported for the first time through a metagenomic study. identification of microorganisms with characteristics that are relevant to industries.