Biodiversity of soil fungal communities in agro-ecosystems using DNA metabarcoding

Illumina metabarcoding of a soil fungal community

Next generation metabarcoding is becoming an indispensable tool in fungal community ecology. Here we tested Illumina metabarcoding, a method that generates shorter reads but achieves deeper sequencing than 454 metabarcoding approaches. We found that paired-end Illumina MiSeq data cover the full ITS1 in many fungal lineages and are suitable for environmental fungal community assessment. There wa...

Next-generation monitoring of aquatic biodiversity using environmental DNA metabarcoding.

Global biodiversity in freshwater and the oceans is declining at high rates. Reliable tools for assessing and monitoring aquatic biodiversity, especially for rare and secretive species, are important for efficient and timely management. Recent advances in DNA sequencing have provided a new tool for species detection from DNA present in the environment. In this study, we tested whether an enviro...

Environmental Evaluation and Monitoring of Agro-Ecosystems Biodiversity

Fungal communities in sediments of subtropical Chinese seas as estimated by DNA metabarcoding

Ribosomal RNA internal transcribed spacer-1 (ITS1) metabarcoding was used to investigate the distribution patterns of fungal communities and the factors influencing these patterns in subtropical Chinese seas, including the southern and northern Yellow Sea and the Bohai Sea. These seas were found to harbor high levels of fungal diversity, with 816 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) that span 130...

Metabarcoding of fungal communities associated with bark beetles

Many species of fungi are closely allied with bark beetles, including many tree pathogens, but their species richness and patterns of distribution remain largely unknown. We established a protocol for metabarcoding of fungal communities directly from total genomic DNA extracted from individual beetles, showing that the ITS3/4 primer pair selectively amplifies the fungal ITS. Using three specime...