Moderately Halophilic, Exopolysaccharide-Producing Bacteria

Moderate halophiles include a wide array of microorganisms, taxonomically and physiologically distributed among many groups within the Bacteria domain and some groups of the Archaea. Their common characteristic is that they grow best at NaCl concentrations between 0.5 and 2.5 M (Kushner and Kamekura 1988), although they can be found in quite a diverse range of hypersaline habitats (Horikoshi and Grant 1998; Oren 1999).