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Abstract
Fungi are ecologically important in several ecosystem processes, yet their community composition, ecophysiological roles, and responses to changing environmental factors in historical sediments are rarely studied. Here we explored ancient fungal DNA from lake Lielais Svētiņu sediment throughout the Holocene (10.5 kyr) using the ITS metabarcoding approach. Our data revealed diverse fungal taxa and smooth community changes during most of the Holocene with rapid changes occurring in the last few millennia. More precisely, plankton parasitic fungi became more diverse from the Late Holocene (2–4 kyr) which could be related to a shift towards a cooler climate. The Latest Holocene (~2 kyr) showed a distinct increase in the richness of plankton parasites, mycorrhizal, and plant pathogenic fungi which can be associated with an increased transfer rate of plant material into the lake and blooms of planktonic organisms influenced by increased, yet moderate, human impact. Thus, major community shifts in plankton parasites and mycorrhizal fungi could be utilized as potential paleo-variables that accompany host-substrate dynamics. Our work demonstrates that fungal aDNA with predicted ecophysiology and host specificity can be employed to reconstruct both aquatic and surrounding terrestrial ecosystems and to estimate the influence of environmental change.
Highlights
In recent years, a growing number of studies have used lake sedimentary ancient DNA to reconstruct past ecosystem changes
We demonstrated that fungal aDNA is well preserved in lake sediment shown to have a good record of various paleo-environmental and ecological materials pollen, We demonstrated that fungal aDNA
Our study demonstrates that the ecophysiology of fungi archived into historical sediment records can be used to study the environmental drivers of past communities and processes in both lakes and their surrounding landscapes
Summary
A growing number of studies have used lake sedimentary ancient DNA (sedaDNA) to reconstruct past ecosystem changes. Only a few studies from permafrost [5,6,9], sea sediments [10], lake [11,12,13], and cave sediments [14] have used molecular-based methods to assess the past fungal or whole eukaryotic diversity in historical ecosystems Some of these studies [5,10,11,12,13] used universal 18S rDNA region primers that enable one to detect a wide variety of eukaryotes but restricts the number of identified fungal taxa.
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