Soil fungal taxonomic diversity along an elevation gradient on the semi-arid Xinglong Mountain, Northwest China
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Soil fungal taxonomic diversity along an elevation gradient on the semi‑arid Xinglong Mountain, Northwest China Salman Khan1,2 · Ning Chen1,2 · Cankun Zhang1,2 · Luning Wang1,2 · Chun Han1,2 · Kanglong Lu1,2 · Yage Li1,2 · Muhammad Rafiq3 · Awais Iqbal1 · Changming Zhao1,2 Received: 5 December 2019 / Revised: 2 April 2020 / Accepted: 7 June 2020 © Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Elevation gradients, often regarded as “natural experiments or laboratories”, can be used to study changes in the distribution of microbial diversity related to changes in environmental conditions that typically occur over small geographical scales. We exploited this feature by characterizing fungal composition and diversity along an elevation gradient on Xinglong Mountain, northwest China. For this, we used MiSeq sequencing to obtain fungal sequences and clustered them into operational taxonomic units (OTUs). In total, we obtained 1,203,302 reads, 133,700 on average in each sample of soil collected at three selected elevations (2807, 3046, and 3536 m). The reads were assigned to 2192 OTUs. Inconsistent variations were observed in fungal alpha-diversity in samples from the three elevations. However, Principal Coordinate Analysis based on Bray–Curtis and UniFrac (weighted and unweighted) distance metrics revealed that fungal communities in soil samples from 3046 and 3536 m elevations were most similar. Principal Component Analysis based on relative abundances of shared OTUs confirmed that OTUs in samples from 3536 m elevation were more closely related to OTUs from 3046 m than samples from 2807 m elevation. Ascomycota, Basidiomycota, Glomeromycota, Cercozoa and Chytridiomycota were the most abundant fungal phyla across the elevation gradient. Our study also provides valuable indications of relations between fungal communities and an array of soil chemical properties, and variations in fungal taxonomic diversity across a substantial elevation gradient. Keywords Metagenomics · Internal transcribe spacer (ITS) region · Elevation · Ascomycota · Basidiomycota · Operational taxonomic units (OTUs) · Alpha-diversity · Beta-diversity
Introduction
Communicated by Erko Stackebrandt. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (https://doi.org/10.1007/s00203-020-01948-2) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. * Changming Zhao [email protected] 1
State Key Laboratory of Grassland Agro‑Ecosystems, School of Life Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou 730000, Gansu, China
2
Gansu Provincial Field Scientific Observation and Research Station of Mountain Ecosystems, Lanzhou 730000, Gansu, China
3
Department of Microbiology, Balochistan University of IT, Engineering and Management Sciences (BUITEMS), Quetta, Pakistan
During the last 200 years mountain ecosystems have attracted great interest among global ecologists because they cover elevation gradients where edaphic, vegetal and climatic conditions change dramatically over sm
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