Wild rodents harbour high diversity of Arthroderma

Abstract

Arthroderma is the most diverse genus of dermatophytes, and its natural reservoir is considered to be soil enriched by keratin sources. During a study on the diversity of dermatophytes in wild small rodents in the Czech Republic, we isolated several strains of Arthroderma. To explore the diversity and ecological significance of these isolates from rodents (n = 29), we characterised the strains genetically (i.e., sequenced ITS, tubb and tef1α), morphologically, physiologically, and by conducting mating experiments. We then compared the rodent-derived strains to existing ITS sequence data from GenBank and the GlobalFungi Database to further investigate biogeography and the association of Arthroderma species with different types of environments. In total, eight Arthroderma species were isolated from rodents, including four previously described species (A. crocatum, A. cuniculi, A. curreyi, A. quadrifidum) and four new species proposed herein, i.e., A. rodenticum, A. simile, A. zoogenum and A. psychrophilum. The geographical distribution of these newly described species was not restricted to the Czech Republic nor rodents. Additional isolates were obtained from bats and other mammals, reptiles, and soil from Europe, North America, and Asia. Data mining showed that the genus has a diverse ecology, with some lineages occurring relatively frequently in soil, whereas others appeared to be more closely associated with live animals, as we observed in A. rodenticum. Low numbers of sequence reads ascribed to Arthroderma in soil show that the genus is rare in this environment, which supports the hypothesis that Arthroderma spp. are not soil generalists but rather strongly associated with animals and keratin debris. This is the first study to utilise existing metabarcoding data to assess biogeographical, ecological, and diversity patterns in dermatophytes.

GlobalAMFungi: a global database of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal occurrences from high‐throughput sequencing metabarcoding studies

“…A previous attempt to collect and validate published data on the composition of complete fungal communities was solely focussed on metabarcoding studies using general fungal primers, targeting the ITS region of rRNA (Větrovský et al ., 2020). Although the resulting freely available GlobalFungi database, which in its current version includes > 57 000 samples from > 500 fungal metabarcoding studies, has proven to be a valuable tool for determining the biogeography of various fungal taxa (Réblová et al ., 2021; Sugiyama & Sato, 2021; Mozzachiodi et al ., 2022; Moulíková et al ., 2023), for identifying non‐native symbiotic fungi associating with alien plants (Vlk et al ., 2020a,b) or for estimating global fungal species richness (Baldrian et al ., 2022b), it does not sufficiently represent the distribution and community composition of AM fungal taxa due to the limitations of general fungal primer systems. As a consequence, only c .…”

Dermatophytes and hair: aspects of evolution of Arthrodermataceae

“…Based on our results, the hair of Hyracoidea and Rodentia appears to be the easiest to degrade by dermatophytes, while bat hair is the most difficult to degrade. However, recent findings by Moulíková (Moulíková Š et al 2023) suggest that none of the zoophilic Trichophyton and Microsporum species they isolated from small wild rodents, nor did they isolate any geophilic dermatophytes outside of the Arthroderma genus. In contrast, our study found that Trichophyton and Nannizzia gypsea were highly effective at degrading Rodentia hair.…”