Yeasts dominate soil fungal communities in three lowland Neotropical rainforests

Abstract

Forest soils typically harbour a vast diversity of fungi, but are usually dominated by filamentous (hyphae-forming) taxa. Compared to temperate and boreal forests, though, we have limited knowledge about the fungal diversity in tropical rainforest soils. Here we show, by environmental metabarcoding of soil samples collected in three Neotropical rainforests, that Yeasts dominate the fungal communities in terms of the number of sequencing reads and OTUs. These unicellular forms are commonly found in aquatic environments, and their hyperdiversity may be the result of frequent inundation combined with numerous aquatic microenvironments in these rainforests. Other fungi that are frequent in aquatic environments, such as the abundant Chytridiomycotina, were also detected. While there was low similarity in OTU composition within and between the three rainforests, the fungal communities in Central America were more similar to each other than the communities in South America, reflecting a general biogeographic pattern also seen in animals, plants and protists.

Fungal evolution: diversity, taxonomy and phylogeny of the Fungi

“…Given the general association of these fungi with metazoans and other organisms in soil, we expect their presence in soil to be low in terms of biomass, and associated with their hosts. This seems to be the case for rainforest (Tedersoo et al ., ) and prairie soils (Dunthorn et al ., ). Contrary to this assumption, however, there are reports of high abundance of sequences from amoebophagous fungi (genus Kuzuhaea , Zoopagales) in permafrost soils, suggesting that these microfungi are indeed highly abundant in at least certain environments (Penton et al ., ).…”

Patterns of local, intercontinental and interseasonal variation of soil bacterial and eukaryotic microbial communities

“…For eukaryotes, we used the general TarEuk primers described by Stoeck et al (2010): TAReuk454FWD1 [5'-CCAGCA(G/ C)C(C / T)GCGGTAATTCC-3', S. cerevisiae position 565-584] and TAReukREV3 [5'-ACTTTCGTTCTTGAT(C / T) (A / G)A-3', S. cerevisiae position 964-981], targeting the hypervariable V4 region of the 18S rRNA gene. These primers were selected not only as they have been used previously in studies looking at protist communities (Mahé et al 2017) but also for the examination of fungal and metazoan community composition (Bernhard et al 2014;Pawlowski et al 2014;Dunthorn et al 2017;López-Escardó et al 2018). An adapter was included in the primers for attaching indices after the initial polymerase chain reaction (PCR).…”

Protist Biodiversity and Biogeography in Lakes From Four Brazilian River–Floodplain Systems

“…() found for the Neotropical rainforest soil samples (mean Jaccard index = 0.038), as recalculated by Dunthorn et al. (). They were, though, in the same range of similarity values that were estimated for protistan communities from temperate and alpine lakes (Boenigk et al.…”