Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies have revolutionized
our understanding of microbial diversity and composition in relation to their environment. HTS-based
characterization of metabolically active (RNA-derived) and total (DNA-derived) fungal communities
in different terrestrial habitats has revealed profound differences in both richness and community
compositions. However, such DNA- and RNA-based HTS comparisons are widely missing for
fungal communities of groundwater aquifers in the terrestrial biogeosphere. Therefore, in this
study, we extracted DNA and RNA from groundwater samples of two pristine aquifers in the
Hainich CZE and employed paired-end Illumina sequencing of the fungal nuclear ribosomal internal
transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) region to comprehensively test difference/similarities in the “total” and
“active” fungal communities. We found no significant differences in the species richness between
the DNA- and RNA-derived fungal communities, but the relative abundances of various fungal
operational taxonomic units (OTUs) appeared to differ. We also found the same set of environmental
parameters to shape the “total” and “active” fungal communities in the targeted aquifers. Furthermore,
our comparison also underlined that about 30%–40% of the fungal OTUs were only detected in
RNA-derived communities. This implies that the active fungal communities analyzed by HTS
methods in the subsurface aquifers are actually not a subset of supposedly total fungal communities.
In general, our study highlights the importance of differentiating the potential (DNA-derived) and
expressed (RNA-derived) members of the fungal communities in aquatic ecosystems.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:DRESDEN/oai:qucosa:de:qucosa:84649 |
| Date | 11 April 2023 |
| Creators | Nawaz, Ali, Purahong, Witoon, Herrmann, Martina, Küsel, Kirsten, Buscot, Francois, Wubet, Tesfaye |
| Publisher | MDPI |
| Source Sets | Hochschulschriftenserver (HSSS) der SLUB Dresden |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion, doc-type:article, info:eu-repo/semantics/article, doc-type:Text |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | 2076-2607, 341 |
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