School of Earth & Environmental Sciences, The University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, UK.
NERC British Antarctic Survey, High Cross, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 0ET, UK.
Environ Microbiol. 2019 May;21(5):1586-1596. doi: 10.1111/1462-2920.14533. Epub 2019 Feb 22.
Our understanding of the diversity and community dynamics of soil fungi has increased greatly through the use of DNA-based identification. Community characterization of metabolically active communities via RNA sequencing has previously revealed differences between 'active' and 'total' fungal communities, which may be influenced by the persistence of DNA from nonactive components. However, it is not known how fungal traits influence their prevalence in these contrasting community profiles. In this study, we coextracted DNA and RNA from soil collected from three Antarctic islands to test for differences between total and active soil fungal communities. By matching these geographically isolated fungi against a global dataset of soil fungi, we show that widely dispersed taxa are often more abundant in the total community, whilst taxa restricted to Antarctica are more likely to have higher abundance in the active community. In addition, we find that active communities have lower richness, and show a reduction in the abundance of the most dominant fungi, whilst there are consistent differences in the abundances of certain taxonomic groups between the total and active communities. These results suggest that the views of soil fungal communities offered by DNA- and RNA-based characterization differ in predictable ways.
通过使用基于 DNA 的鉴定方法，我们对土壤真菌的多样性和群落动态有了很大的了解。通过 RNA 测序对代谢活跃群落进行群落特征描述，先前已经揭示了“活跃”和“总”真菌群落之间的差异，这些差异可能受到非活跃成分 DNA 持续存在的影响。然而，目前尚不清楚真菌特征如何影响它们在这些对比鲜明的群落特征中的流行程度。在这项研究中，我们从三个南极岛屿采集的土壤中同时提取 DNA 和 RNA，以测试总土壤真菌群落和活跃土壤真菌群落之间的差异。通过将这些在地理上隔离的真菌与全球土壤真菌数据集相匹配，我们表明广泛分布的分类群在总群落中通常更为丰富，而仅限于南极洲的分类群在活跃群落中更有可能具有更高的丰度。此外，我们发现活跃群落的丰富度较低，并且最主要的真菌的丰度降低，而在总群落和活跃群落之间某些分类群的丰度存在一致的差异。这些结果表明，基于 DNA 和 RNA 的特征描述所提供的土壤真菌群落的观点以可预测的方式存在差异。
