Metagenomic insights into the fungal assemblages of the northwest Himalayan cold desert
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Metagenomic insights into the fungal assemblages of the northwest Himalayan cold desert Puja Gupta1 · Jyoti Vakhlu1 · Yash Pal Sharma2 · Madangchanok Imchen3 · Ranjith Kumavath3 Received: 16 February 2020 / Accepted: 13 July 2020 © Springer Japan KK, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Psychrophilic fungi are a critical biotic component in cold deserts that serves a central role in nutrient recycling and biogeochemical cycles. Despite their ecological significance, culture-independent studies on psychrophilic mycobiome are limited. In the present study, the fungal diversity patterns across the Drass, an Indian cold desert in the Himalaya, were indexed by targeted amplicon pyrosequencing (ITS). In the Drass dataset, Ascomycota was represented by 92 genera, while 22 genera represented Basidiomycota. The most abundant genus was Conocybe (20.46%). Most of the identified genera were reported in the literature to be prolific extracellular hydrolytic enzyme producers. To identify whether the Drass fungal assemblages share similarities to other cold deserts, these were further compared to Antarctic and Arctic cold deserts. Comparative analysis across the three cold deserts indicated the dominance of Dikarya (Ascomycota and Basidiomycota). The observed alpha diversity, Shannon index as well as Pielou’s evenness was highest in the Antarctic followed by Drass and Arctic datasets. The genera Malassezia, Preussia, Pseudogymnoascus, Cadophora, Geopora, Monodictys, Tetracladium, Titaea, Mortierella, and Cladosporium were common to all the cold deserts. Furthermore, Conocybe was represented predominantly in Drass. Interestingly, the genus Conocybe has not been previously reported from any other studies on Antarctic or Arctic biomes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fungal metagenome study in Drass soil. Our analysis shows that despite the similarities of low temperature among the cold deserts, a significant differential abundance of fungal communities prevails in the global cold deserts. Keywords Fungal diversity · Cold desert · Pyrosequencing · Conocybe · Ecotype
Introduction Communicated by A. Oren. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00792-020-01191-z) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Puja Gupta [email protected] * Jyoti Vakhlu [email protected] * Ranjith Kumavath [email protected]; [email protected] 1
School of Biotechnology, University of Jammu, Jammu 180006, Jammu and Kashmir, India
2
Department of Botany, University of Jammu, Jammu 180006, Jammu and Kashmir, India
3
Department of Genomic Science, Central University of Kerala, Tejaswini Hills, Kasaragod, Periya 671320, India
The mycobiome represents the fungal community within a biome (Schnecker et al. 2014) and these biotic communities participate in crucial ecological processes operating in the ecosystems. The literature holds ample reports on the fungal community structure of contrasting
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