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Global Fungal Diversity Estimated from High-Throughput Sequencing

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Evolution of Fungi and Fungal-Like Organisms

Part of the book series: The Mycota ((MYCOTA,volume 14))

Abstract

Fungi are key players in vital ecosystem services, spanning carbon cycling, decomposition, and varied plant symbioses. Due to their cryptic lifestyle, it was difficult to assess their diversity until the advent of methods of high-throughput sequencing. Based on the papers utilizing high-throughput sequencing approaches to study fungi in natural habitats using the nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) contained in the public open database GlobalFungi (https://globalfungi.com), the current estimate of global fungal diversity is 6.3 million species, considering 97% sequence similarity as a species-level threshold. Of the observed fungi, most belong to Ascomycota and Basidiomycota: 57% and 37% of taxa, respectively. Soil and litter represent the habitats with the highest alpha diversity of fungi followed by air, plant shoots, plant roots, and deadwood. Based on the high-throughput sequencing data, the highest proportion of unknown fungal species is associated with samples of lichen and plant tissues. Climate was identified as the key driver of fungal biogeography. In contrast to plants and most other taxa, fungal diversity in tropics appears to be lower than at high latitudes. Despite limitations, the use of high-throughput sequencing is an important tool for the assessment of diversity, biogeography, and ecology of fungi.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the Czech Science Foundation (21-17749S).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Laboratory of Environmental Microbiology, Institute of Microbiology of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Praha, Czech Republic

    Petr Baldrian, Petr Kohout & Tomáš Větrovský

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  1. Petr Baldrian
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  2. Petr Kohout
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  3. Tomáš Větrovský
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Correspondence to Petr Baldrian .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Institute for Microbiology and Genetics, Georg-August-University, Göttingen, Germany

    Stefanie Pöggeler

  2. Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA

    Timothy James

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Baldrian, P., Kohout, P., Větrovský, T. (2023). Global Fungal Diversity Estimated from High-Throughput Sequencing. In: Pöggeler, S., James, T. (eds) Evolution of Fungi and Fungal-Like Organisms. The Mycota, vol 14. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29199-9_10

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