  The Kutch desert (Great Rann of Kutch, Gujarat, India) is a unique ecosystem:
in the larger part of the year it is a hot, salty desert that is flooded
regularly in the Indian monsoon season. In the dry season, the crystallized
salt deposits form the "white desert" in large regions. The first metagenomic
analysis of the soil samples of Kutch was published in 2013, and the data was
deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive. The sequences were analyzed at the
same time phylogenetically for prokaryotes, especially for bacterial taxa.
  In the present work, we are searching for the DNA sequences of the recently
discovered giant viruses in the soil samples of the Kutch desert. Since most
giant viruses were discovered in biofilms in industrial cooling towers, ocean
water and freshwater ponds, we were surprised to find their DNA sequences in
the soil samples of a seasonally very hot and arid, salty environment.
