Fungal identification biases in microbiome projects

Abstract

Fungi are the key players in ecosystems as well as in plant and human health. High-throughput molecular identification of fungi has greatly progressed our understanding about the diversity of mutualists, saprotrophs, and pathogens. We argue that the methods promoted by the microbiome consortia are suboptimal for detection of the most important fungal pathogens and ecologically important degraders. We recommend several sets of optimized primers for analysis of fungi or all eukaryote groups based on either short or long amplicons that cover the ITS region as well as part of 18S and 28S rDNA.