Abstract
The fungal diversity in deep-sea environments has recently gained an increasing amount attention. Our knowledge and understanding of the true fungal diversity and the role it plays in deep-sea environments, however, is still limited. We investigated the fungal community structure in five sediments from a depth of ∼4000 m in the East India Ocean using a combination of targeted environmental sequencing and traditional cultivation. This approach resulted in the recovery of a total of 45 fungal operational taxonomic units (OTUs) and 20 culturable fungal phylotypes. This finding indicates that there is a great amount of fungal diversity in the deep-sea sediments collected in the East Indian Ocean. Three fungal OTUs and one culturable phylotype demonstrated high divergence (89%–97%) from the existing sequences in the GenBank. Moreover, 44.4% fungal OTUs and 30% culturable fungal phylotypes are new reports for deep-sea sediments. These results suggest that the deep-sea sediments from the East India Ocean can serve as habitats for new fungal communities compared with other deep-sea environments. In addition, different fungal community could be detected when using targeted environmental sequencing compared with traditional cultivation in this study, which suggests that a combination of targeted environmental sequencing and traditional cultivation will generate a more diverse fungal community in deep-sea environments than using either targeted environmental sequencing or traditional cultivation alone. This study is the first to report new insights into the fungal communities in deep-sea sediments from the East Indian Ocean, which increases our knowledge and understanding of the fungal diversity in deep-sea environments.
Highlights
Once thought to be an uninhabitable milieu owing to its extreme conditions, the deep-sea is recognized as a home to rich and largely microbial communities [1]
445 sequences were found to be fungal, and a total of 45 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) (Table 2) were identified after clustering based on a 98% sequence identity criterion
It is likely that the fungal diversity of the two samples is higher than what was detected in this study
Summary
Once thought to be an uninhabitable milieu owing to its extreme conditions, the deep-sea is recognized as a home to rich and largely microbial communities [1]. Whitman et al [2] reported that deep-sea-derived microbial communities, mainly composed of bacteria and archaea, accounted for a total cellular carbon content of approximately 361017 g. Besides bacteria and archaea [3,4,5], fungi in deep-sea environments have been extensively studied [6,7,8]. The distribution and diversity of fungal communities in deep-sea environments are still largely unknown. With the recent development of more advanced instruments designed for sampling and researching life at greater depths, there has been more interest in evaluating the diversity and ecological role of fungi from deep-sea environments [14,15,16,17,18,19,20]
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