A molecular toolkit to hunt and resolve Fungal Dark Matter (FDM) in extreme planetary environments

Abstract

<p>Fungi are amazing but largely enigmatic creatures with huge diversity and biological potentials in any conceivable ecosystem known so far. This holds for our planet but now this also seems to be true for outer space and other planetary bodies. However, we do not know what kind of extremophile fungi are or had been growing on other planets. To have a clue we need to explore the extreme analogue sites on our planet. The traditional methods used in the field of microbial ecology are definitely not sufficient to study those enigmatic group of fungi. Therefore, the filed extreme analogue sites need to be studied by using novel but advance molecular methods. In this regard, we collected and study samples from samples from various habitats of Matis - Iceland using a unique combination of Laser-microdissection of single cells and long-read sequencing to fully resolve the Fungal Dark Matter (FDM) of Mars-analogue extreme sites of Iceland. The findings of the project will help the wider scientific community dealing in AstroMycology in specific and Astrobiology in general to rightly speculate the capabilities and limitations of fungal life in extreme environments and correlate it with the conditions of other planets.</p>