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. 2015 Oct 23:5:14524.
doi: 10.1038/srep14524.

Diversity and distribution of fungal communities in the marine sediments of Kongsfjorden, Svalbard (High Arctic)

Tao Zhang  1 , Neng Fei Wang  2 , Yu Qin Zhang  1 , Hong Yu Liu  1 , Li Yan Yu  1
Affiliations

Diversity and distribution of fungal communities in the marine sediments of Kongsfjorden, Svalbard (High Arctic)

Tao Zhang et al. Sci Rep. .

Abstract

This study assessed the diversity and distribution of fungal communities in eight marine sediments of Kongsfjorden (Svalbard, High Arctic) using 454 pyrosequencing with fungal-specific primers targeting the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of the ribosomal rRNA gene. Sedimentary fungal communities showed high diversity with 42,219 reads belonging to 113 operational taxonomic units (OTUs). Of these OTUs, 62 belonged to the Ascomycota, 26 to Basidiomycota, 2 to Chytridiomycota, 1 to Zygomycota, 1 to Glomeromycota, and 21 to unknown fungi. The major known orders included Hypocreales and Saccharomycetales. The common fungal genera were Pichia, Fusarium, Alternaria, and Malassezia. Interestingly, most fungi occurring in these Arctic sediments may originate from the terrestrial habitats and different basins in Kongsfjorden (i.e., inner basin, central basin, and outer basin) harbor different sedimentary fungal communities. These results suggest the existence of diverse fungal communities in the Arctic marine sediments, which may serve as a useful community model for further ecological and evolutionary study of fungi in the Arctic.

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Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1. Map of Kongsfjorden in Svalbard (High Arctic) showing the sites where sediment samples were collected for this study (created using drawing tool software in Window 8.0).
Three sites in the inner basin are indicated by red dots, three sites in the central basin indicated by green dots, and two sites in the outer basin indicated by yellow dots.
Figure 2
Figure 2
(a) The taxonomic distribution of 42,219 sequences at the order level. (b) The taxonomic distribution of 113 OTUs at the order level.
Figure 3
Figure 3. A phylogenetic tree showing the relationship between the sedimentary fungi in Kongsfjorden (113 fungal OTUs in red) and fungi in Arctic waters from lands around Kongsfjorden (128 fungal OTUs).
The phylogenetic tree was constructed based on the ITS sequence using the Neighbor-Joining method with the maximum composite likelihood substitution model. Bootstrap values for 1,000 replicates are given in the branch nodes. The OTUs indicated by a blue dot are phylogeneticlly close to fungal OTUs from Arctic waters.
Figure 4
Figure 4. Distance based redundancy analysis (db-RDA) of square-root-transformed Bray-Curtis distances on abundance data for the 113 fungal OTUs.
The different colors/symbols represent the 8 sediment samples. Three samples in the inner basin are indicated by red diamonds, three samples in the central basin indicated by green diamonds, and two samples in the outer basin indicated by yellow diamonds. Rectangles represent physicochemical factors.
Figure 5
Figure 5
(a) A Venn diagram showing the degree of overlap of fungal OTUs among the 3 different basins. (b) A Gephi network diagram illustrating the 113 fungal OTUs and highlighting the number of shared OTUs among the 8 sediment samples.
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