Fig. 1

Abundant prokaryotic groups in five hypersaline soda lake sediments. a Relative abundance of the top-level taxa (those with ≥ 1% abundance in at least one dataset) based on 16S rRNA reads in unassembled metagenomic datasets. b Relative abundance of the 16S rRNA OTUs (those with sum of abundance in all datasets ≥ 3%) recovered by amplicon sequencing assigned where possible down to the genus-level. Three of the assessed soda lakes have a moderate salinity (70–110 g L⁻¹), two are salt-saturated (400 g L^− 1)