High‑throughput sequencing view on the magnitude of global fungal diversity

High-throughput DNA sequencing has dramatically transformed several areas of biodiversity research including mycol-ogy.Despite limitations,high-throughput sequencing is nowadays a predominant method to characterize the alpha and beta diversity of fungal communities.Across the papers utilizing high-throughput sequencing approaches to study natural habitats in terrestrial ecosystems worldwide,>200 studies published until 2019 have generated over 250 million sequences of the primary mycological metabarcoding marker,the nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer 2(ITS2).Here we show that at a 97%sequence similarity threshold,the total richness of non-singleton fungal taxa across the studies published so far is 1.08 million,mostly Ascomycota(56.8%of the taxa)and Basidiomycota(36.7%of the taxa).The Chao-1 estimate of the total extant fungal diversity based on this dataset is 6.28 million taxa,representing a conservative estimate of global fungal species richness.Soil and litter represent the habitats with the highest alpha diversity of fungi followed by air,plant shoots,plant roots and deadwood with Chao-1 predictions,for samples containing 5000 sequences,of 1219,569,392,228,215 and 140 molecular species,respectively.Based on the high-throughput sequencing data,the highest proportion of unknown fungal species is associated with samples of lichen and plant tissues.When considering the use of high-throughput sequenc-ing for the estimation of global fungal diversity,the limitations of the method have to be taken into account,some of which are sequencing platform-specific while others are inherent to the metabarcoding approaches of species representation.In this respect,high-throughput sequencing data can complement fungal diversity predictions based on methods of traditional mycology and increase our understanding of fungal biodiversity.

FungalTraits:a user-friendly traits database of fungi and fungus-like stramenopiles

The cryptic lifestyle of most fungi necessitates molecular identification of the guild in environmental studies.Over the past decades,rapid development and affordability of molecular tools have tremendously improved insights of the fungal diversity in all ecosystems and habitats.Yet,in spite of the progress of molecular methods,knowledge about functional properties of the fungal taxa is vague and interpretation of environmental studies in an ecologically meaningful manner remains challenging.In order to facilitate functional assignments and ecological interpretation of environmental studies we introduce a user friendly traits and character database FungalTraits operating at genus and species hypothesis levels.Combining the information from previous efforts such as FUNGuild and FunFun together with involvement of expert knowledge,we reannotated 10,210 and 151 fungal and Stramenopila genera,respectively.This resulted in a stand-alone spreadsheet dataset covering 17 lifestyle related traits of fungal and Stramenopila genera,designed for rapid functional assignments of environmental stud-ies.In order to assign the trait states to fungal species hypotheses,the scientific community of experts manually categorised and assigned available trait information to 697,413 fungal ITS sequences.On the basis of those sequences we were able to summarise trait and host information into 92,623 fungal species hypotheses at 1%dissimilarity threshold.

Diversity of foliar endophytes in wind-fallen Picea abies trees

The unmanaged Norway spruce montane forests in the Bohemian Forest National Park(Czech Republic)suffered from repeated large-scale bark beetle outbreaks in last decade.In this study,the diversity of culturable foliar endophyte microfungi in needles originating from eleven recently wind-fallen trees in this area was surveyed.Our aims were to describe their diversity and to determine the relative host and organ specificities of isolated endophyte species to estimate the species pool and abundance of foliar endophytes before the forest degradation.Microfungi were isolated from surface-sterilized needles,and the outgrowing strains were identified based on morphological and molecular characteristics(analyses of ITS1,ITS2 and partial 28S rDNA).Fungal communities in the needles were diverse,with ascomycetes(mostly anamorphs of Helotiales)dominating basidiomycetes.The most frequent species(Phacidiopycnis sp.,Cistella acuum,Sirococcus sp.and two species of Chalara)did not correspond with those recorded in previous studies of Picea spp.For example,the widely distributed Lophodermium piceae was rarely recorded in this study.This pattern may be caused by different methods of sterilization and cultivation or by physiological characteristics of the needles,or it may reflect the species distribution in the studied area.Members of the Helotiales,along with sequences from GenBank,showed substantial overlap in host affinities,most prominently between Pinus and Picea,and also among species from distant plant lineages.

Correction to:FungalTraits:a user friendly traits database of fungi and fungus-like stramenopiles

Correction to:Fungal Diversity(2020)105:116 https://doi.org/10.1007/s13225-020-00466-2 There were errors in the name of author LászlóG.Nagy and in affiliation no.31 in the original publication.The original article has been corrected.