Samarasinghe Himeshi, Lu Yi, Aljohani Renad, Al-Amad Ahmad, Yoell Heather, Xu Jianping
Department of Biology, McMaster University, Hamilton, ON, Canada.
Department of Infectious Diseases, South Kensington Campus, Imperial College London, London, UK.
iScience. 2021 Sep 9;24(10):103098. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2021.103098. eCollection 2021 Oct 22.
Yeasts, broadly defined as unicellular fungi, fulfill essential roles in soil ecosystems as decomposers and nutrition sources for fellow soil-dwellers. Broad-scale investigations of soil yeasts pose a methodological challenge as metagenomics are of limited use for identifying this group of fungi. Here we characterize global soil yeast diversity using fungal DNA barcoding on 1473 yeasts cultured from 3826 soil samples obtained from nine countries in six continents. We identify mean annual precipitation and international air travel as two significant correlates with soil yeast community structure and composition worldwide. Evidence for anthropogenic influences on soil yeast communities, directly via travel and indirectly via altered rainfall patterns resulting from climate change, is concerning as we found common infectious yeasts frequently distributed in soil in several countries. Our discovery of 41 putative novel species highlights the continued need for culture-based studies to advance our knowledge of environmental yeast diversity.
酵母，广义上定义为单细胞真菌，在土壤生态系统中作为分解者和其他土壤生物的营养来源发挥着重要作用。对土壤酵母进行大规模调查面临方法上的挑战，因为宏基因组学在识别这一类真菌方面用途有限。在此，我们利用真菌DNA条形码技术，对从六大洲九个国家采集的3826份土壤样本中培养出的1473株酵母进行分析，以表征全球土壤酵母的多样性。我们确定年平均降水量和国际航空旅行是与全球土壤酵母群落结构和组成显著相关的两个因素。人为因素通过旅行直接影响土壤酵母群落，以及通过气候变化导致降雨模式改变间接影响土壤酵母群落，这一证据令人担忧，因为我们发现几种常见的感染性酵母在多个国家的土壤中广泛分布。我们发现了41个假定的新物种，这凸显了持续开展基于培养的研究对于增进我们对环境酵母多样性了解的必要性。
