Abstract
Fungi in soil play pivotal roles in nutrient cycling, pest controls, and plant community succession in terrestrial ecosystems. Despite the ecosystem functions provided by soil fungi, our knowledge of the assembly processes of belowground fungi has been limited. In particular, we still have limited knowledge of how diverse functional groups of fungi interact with each other in facilitative and competitive ways in soil. Based on the high-throughput sequencing data of fungi in a cool-temperate forest in northern Japan, we analyzed how taxonomically and functionally diverse fungi showed correlated fine-scale distributions in soil. By uncovering pairs of fungi that frequently co-occurred in the same soil samples, networks depicting fine-scale co-occurrences of fungi were inferred at the O (organic matter) and A (surface soil) horizons. The results then led to the working hypothesis that mycorrhizal, endophytic, saprotrophic, and pathogenic fungi could form compartmentalized (modular) networks of facilitative, antagonistic, and/or competitive interactions in belowground ecosystems. Overall, this study provides a research basis for further understanding how interspecific interactions, along with sharing of niches among fungi, drive the dynamics of poorly explored biospheres in soil.
Highlights
Fungi in soil constitute highly species-rich biological communities, playing pivotal functional roles in various types of terrestrial ecosystems [1,2,3]
The soil samples were stored at -25°C and DNA extraction was conducted with a cetyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) method [45]
The number of sampling positions from which 1000 or more sequencing reads were obtained decreased at deeper positions, the total number of fungal operational taxonomic units (OTUs) observed was saturated with a smaller number of horizontal sampling positions in deeper vertical positions (Fig 1b)
Summary
Fungi in soil constitute highly species-rich biological communities, playing pivotal functional roles in various types of terrestrial ecosystems [1,2,3]. In forest and grassland ecosystems, diverse mycorrhizal fungi promote the growth of host plants by providing soil nitrogen and phosphorus [4,5,6], while many host-specific pathogenic fungi attack plants [7], potentially promoting species coexistence in plant communities [8] (sensu [9]). Html] of "PRESTO by JST (No 11118); and the Funding Program for Generation WorldLeading Researchers of Cabinet Office, the Government of Japan (GS014) to HT [http://www. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript
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