Global AM fungi are dominating mycorrhizal communities in a tropical premontane dry forest in Laipuna, South Ecuador

Ingeborg Haug,Sabrina Setaro,Juan Pablo Suárez

doi:10.1007/s11557-021-01699-4

Ingeborg Haug, Sabrina Setaro + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11557-021-01699-4

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Abstract

Tropical dry forests are an intricate ecosystem with special adaptations to periods of drought. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are essential for plant survival in all terrestrial ecosystems but might be of even greater importance in dry forests as plant growth is limited due to nutrient and water deficiency during the dry season. Tropical dry forests in Ecuador are highly endangered, but studies about AMF communities are scarce. We investigated the AMF community of a premontane semi-deciduous dry forest in South Ecuador during the dry season. We estimated AMF diversity, distribution, and composition of the study site based on operational taxonomic units (OTUs) and compared the results to those from the tropical montane rainforest and páramo in South Ecuador. OTU delimitation was based on part of the small ribosomal subunit obtained by cloning and Sanger sequencing. Nearly all OTUs were Glomeraceae. The four frequent OTUs were Glomus, and comparison with the MaarjAM database revealed these to be globally distributed with a wide range of ecological adaptations. Several OTUs are shared with virtual taxa from dry forests in Africa. Ordination analysis of AMF communities from the tropical dry and montane rainforests in South Ecuador revealed a unique AMF community in the dry forest with only few overlapping OTUs. Most OTUs that were found in both dry and rainforests and on the two continents were globally distributed Glomus.

Highlights

Tropical dry forests are a unique biome that can be found in the tropics of South America, Central America, Africa, and Eurasia (Miles et al 2006)
Neotropical dry forests are distinguished into 12 groups, based on the occurrence and frequency of their woody species (DRYFLOR et al 2016): (i) Mexico, (ii) Antilles, (iii) Central America–northern South America, (iv) northern inter-Andean valleys, (v) central inter-Andean valleys, (vi) central Andes coast, (vii) Tarapoto-Quillabamba, (viii) Apurimac-Mantaro, (ix) Piedmont, (x) Misiones, (xi) central Brazil, and (xii) Caatinga
We present the first results of Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) community composition for one of the two floristic groups in Ecuador—the Central Andes Coast Forests (vi)

Summary

Introduction

Tropical dry forests are a unique biome that can be found in the tropics of South America, Central America, Africa, and Eurasia (Miles et al 2006). For most of the floristic groups, no studies about mycorrhizal communities exist, with the exception of Mexico (i) (Aguilar-Fernandéz et al 2009, Carillo-Saucedo et al 2018, Guadarrama et al 2014) and Caatinga (xii) in Brazil (Sousa et al 2018, Marinho et al 2019, Teixeira-Rios et al 2018) All of these studies used spores to identify AMF, and based on that, the results show a high level of agreement with dominant representatives of the Glomeraceae and Acaulosporaceae. We present the first results of AMF community composition for one of the two floristic groups in Ecuador—the Central Andes Coast Forests (vi) To our knowledge, this is the first study about AMF in neotropical dry forests in Ecuador. Total DNA was isolated with either the innuPREP Plant DNA Kit (Analytik Jena, Germany) or the DNeasy Power Soil Kit (Qiagen, Germany) and re-suspended in a final volume of 100 μl elution buffer

Material and methods

Results and discussion

Diversispora 3 Claroideoglomus