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. 2024 Oct 16:5:1446674.
doi: 10.3389/ffunb.2024.1446674. eCollection 2024.

Metal tolerance of Río Tinto fungi

Monike Oggerin  1 , Catalina Del Moral  1 , Nuria Rodriguez  2 , Nuria Fernandez-Gonzalez  3 , José Manuel Martínez  1 , Iván Lorca  1 , Ricardo Amils  1   2
Affiliations

Metal tolerance of Río Tinto fungi

Monike Oggerin et al. Front Fungal Biol. .

Abstract

Southwest Spain's Río Tinto is a stressful acidic microbial habitat with a noticeably high concentration of toxic heavy metals. Nevertheless, it has an unexpected degree of eukaryotic diversity in its basin, with a high diversity of fungal saprotrophs. Although some studies on the eukaryotic diversity in Rio Tinto have been published, none of them used molecular methodologies to describe the fungal diversity and taxonomic affiliations that emerge along the river in different seasons. The aim of the present study was to isolate and describe the seasonal diversity of the fungal community in the Río Tinto basin and its correlation with the physicochemical parameters existing along the river's course. The taxonomic affiliation of 359 fungal isolates, based on the complete internal transcribed spacer DNA sequences, revealed a high degree of diversity, identifying species belonging primarily to the phylum Ascomycota, but representatives of the Basidiomycota and Mucoromycota phyla were also present. In total, 40 representative isolates along the river were evaluated for their tolerance to toxic heavy metals. Some of the isolates were able to grow in the presence of 1000 mM of Cu2+, 750 mM of As5+ and Cd2+, and 100 mM of Co2+, Ni2+, and Pb2+.

Keywords: Acidiella; Dothideomycetes; Eurotiomycetes; Penicillium; Río Tinto; Sordariomycetes; acidic fungi; heavy metals.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The author(s) declared that they were an editorial board member of Frontiers, at the time of submission. This had no impact on the peer review process and the final decision.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Río Tinto at Berrocal.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Location of the study area, showing the different sampling sites along the Río Tinto. The scale corresponds to 10 km.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Average metal concentrations along the different sampling stations in the Tinto basin. (A) S, (B) Fe, (C) Cu, (D) Ni, (E) As, (F) Co, (G) Cd, (H) Pb, (I) Al. Represented data are the mean values of 19 measurements ( Supplementary Table S2 ).
Figure 4
Figure 4
Neighbor-joining tree of the fungal isolates from Río Tinto.
Figure 5
Figure 5
Non-metric multidimensional scaling (NMDS) based on Jaccard’s dissimilarity index of the presence or absence of fungal classes across all the samples. Samples and fungal classes are represented by grey and black dots respectively. Significant correlations of the NMDS axis with the continuous environmental variables (permutation test, p-value < 0.05) are indicated by the arrows pointing to the steepest change of the variable. dO2, dissolved O2.
Figure 6
Figure 6
Representative TEM images of Río Tinto fungal cells detected in sediment from different sampling sites. (A) and (B) from M01, (C) M16, (D) M18, (E) M14, and (F): M19.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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