Diversity and distribution of fungal communities in the marine sediments of Kongsfjorden, Svalbard (High Arctic).

Hong Yu Liu,Neng Fei Wang,Tao Zhang,Yu Qin Zhang,Li Yan Yu

doi:10.1038/srep14524

Abstract

This study assessed the diversity and distribution of fungal communities in eight marine sediments of Kongsfjorden (Svalbard, High Arctic) using 454 pyrosequencing with fungal-specific primers targeting the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of the ribosomal rRNA gene. Sedimentary fungal communities showed high diversity with 42,219 reads belonging to 113 operational taxonomic units (OTUs). Of these OTUs, 62 belonged to the Ascomycota, 26 to Basidiomycota, 2 to Chytridiomycota, 1 to Zygomycota, 1 to Glomeromycota, and 21 to unknown fungi. The major known orders included Hypocreales and Saccharomycetales. The common fungal genera were Pichia, Fusarium, Alternaria, and Malassezia. Interestingly, most fungi occurring in these Arctic sediments may originate from the terrestrial habitats and different basins in Kongsfjorden (i.e., inner basin, central basin, and outer basin) harbor different sedimentary fungal communities. These results suggest the existence of diverse fungal communities in the Arctic marine sediments, which may serve as a useful community model for further ecological and evolutionary study of fungi in the Arctic.

Highlights

Several previous studies focused on culturable fungi within the marine sediments and reported that a high number of the isolates belonged to terrestrial species which have been adapted to those conditions[6,8,9,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]
The raw data from 8 sediment samples consisted of 80,106 sequences, of which 43,916 sequences were retained after removing sequences with different tags at each end for quality filtering and denoising
This study is the first to use high-throughput sequencing in order to comprehensively analyze the fungal communities within marine sediments from Kongsfjorden (Svalbard, High Arctic), which helps to uncover fungal diversity and distribution patterns in marine sediments of the Arctic fjord

Summary

Introduction

Several previous studies focused on culturable fungi within the marine sediments and reported that a high number of the isolates belonged to terrestrial species (e.g., species of Aspergillus, Cladosporium, Penicillium, and Fusarium) which have been adapted to those conditions[6,8,9,12,13,14,15,16,17,18,19,20]. Kongsfjorden is a glacial fjord in the Arctic It is influenced by both Atlantic and Arctic water masses (e.g., relatively warm and salty water from Atlantic Current)[27]. We used 454 pyrosequencing to investigate the fungal communities that inhabit marine sediments from Kongsfjorden (Fig. 1 and Table 1) to address the following questions: (1) what are the fungal diversity and composition in these marine sediments of the Arctic fjord?

Methods

Results

Conclusion