Descrição
Microorganisms adapted to high salinity are important sources of biotechnological products and valuable astrobiological models due to their resilience in environments analogous to Mars, Europa, and Enceladus. Although metagenomic studies on these organisms have expanded, their geographical and temporal distribution remains poorly understood. To address this, we used the Entrez Direct package to identify relevant studies in PubMed and to download metadata corresponding to their shotgun metagenomic sequences deposited in NCBI, including only samples with latitude and longitude information. Sampling coordinates were processed in R to assign samples to countries and assess temporal trends. From 1,259 retrieved articles, manual filtering yielded 236 relevant studies, of which ~120 contained shotgun metagenomic data, resulting in 1,426 BioSamples from 42 countries. Most samples originated from China (25.9%), the United States (19.1%), and Europe (20.5%), while Latin America and the Arabian Peninsula, despite harboring diverse hypersaline environments, were underrepresented, with Chile as a notable exception. Shotgun metagenomic studies expanded over time, though not linearly, with a decline in 2020 likely linked to the COVID-19 pandemic and lower numbers in 2024–2025 reflecting the time required to publish new articles. The peak in 2023, driven largely by large-scale projects in China and Brazil, illustrates that a few intensive efforts can dominate the dataset. Overall, our analysis shows that the global distribution of saline metagenomic studies is shaped primarily by economic capacity rather than the number of available environments, highlighting how financial resources strongly influence research output in saline-environment microbiology.
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