Hawaiian Fungal Amplicon Sequence Variants Reveal Otherwise Hidden Biogeography.

To study biogeography and other ecological patterns of microorganisms, including fungi, scientists have been using operational taxonomic units (OTUs) as representations of species or species hypotheses. However, when defined by 97% sequence similarity cutoff at an accepted barcode locus such as 16S in bacteria or ITS in fungi, these OTUs can obscure biogeographic patterns, mask taxonomic diversity, and hinder meta-analyses. Amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) have been proposed to alleviate all of these issues and have been shown to do so in bacteria.

Host age is not a consistent predictor of microbial diversity in the coral Porites lutea.

Corals harbour diverse microbial communities that can change in composition as the host grows in age and size. Larger and older colonies have been shown to host a higher diversity of microbial taxa and this has been suggested to be a consequence of their more numerous, complex and varied micro-niches available. However, the effects of host age on community structure and diversity of microbial associates remain equivocal in the few studies performed to date.

Fungal communities living within leaves of native Hawaiian dicots are structured by landscape-scale variables as well as by host plants.

A phylogenetically diverse array of fungi live within healthy leaf tissue of dicotyledonous plants. Many studies have examined these endophytes within a single plant species and/or at small spatial scales, but landscape-scale variables that determine their community composition are not well understood, either across geographic space, across climatic conditions, or in the context of host plant phylogeny. Here, we evaluate the contributions of these variables to endophyte beta diversity using a survey of foliar endophytic fungi in native Hawaiian dicots sampled across the Hawaiian archipelago.

Seagrass-associated fungal communities show distance decay of similarity that has implications for seagrass management and restoration.

Marine fungal biodiversity remains vastly understudied, and even less is known of their biogeography and the processes responsible for driving these distributions in marine environments. We investigated the fungal communities associated with the seagrass collected from Singapore and Peninsular Malaysia to test the hypothesis that fungal communities are homogeneous throughout the study area. Seagrass samples were separated into different structures (leaves, roots, and rhizomes), and a sediment sample was collected next to each plant.

Fungi associated with mesophotic macroalgae from the 'Au'au Channel, west Maui are differentiated by host and overlap terrestrial communities.

Mesophotic coral ecosystems are an almost entirely unexplored and undocumented environment that likely contains vast reservoirs of undescribed biodiversity. Twenty-four macroalgae samples, representing four genera, were collected from a Hawaiian mesophotic reef at water depths between 65 and 86 m in the 'Au'au Channel, Maui, Hawai'i. Algal tissues were surveyed for the presence and diversity of fungi by sequencing the ITS1 gene using Illumina technology.