Forest Fire Influence on Tomicus piniperda-Associated Fungal Communities and Phloem Nutrient Availability of Colonized Pinus sylvestris.

Forest fire is known to positively affect bark beetle populations by providing fire-damaged trees with impaired defenses for infestation. Tomicus piniperda, the common pine shoot beetle, breeds and lays eggs under the bark of stressed pine trees and is considered a serious forest pest within its native range. Wood-colonizing fungi have been hypothesized to improve substrate quality and detoxify tree defensive chemistry to indirectly facilitate tree colonization by beetles.

Effects of operational taxonomic unit inference methods on soil microeukaryote community analysis using long-read metabarcoding.

Long amplicon metabarcoding has opened the door for phylogenetic analysis of the largely unknown communities of microeukaryotes in soil. Here, we amplified and sequenced the ITS and LSU regions of the rDNA operon (around 1500 bp) from grassland soils using PacBio SMRT sequencing. We tested how three different methods for generation of operational taxonomic units (OTUs) effected estimated richness and identified taxa, and how well large-scale ecological patterns associated with shifting environmental conditions were recovered in data from the three methods.

Soil fungal communities of ectomycorrhizal dominated woodlands across West Africa.

Forests and woodlands in the West African Guineo-Sudanian transition zone contain many tree species that form symbiotic interactions with ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi. These fungi facilitate plant growth by increasing nutrient and water uptake and include many fruiting body-forming fungi, including some edible mushrooms. Despite their importance for ecosystem functioning and anthropogenic use, diversity and distribution of ECM fungi is severely under-documented in West Africa.

Naming the untouchable - environmental sequences and niche partitioning as taxonomical evidence in fungi.

Due to their submerged and cryptic lifestyle, the vast majority of fungal species are difficult to observe and describe morphologically, and many remain known to science only from sequences detected in environmental samples. The lack of practices to delimit and name most fungal species is a staggering limitation to communication and interpretation of ecology and evolution in kingdom Fungi. Here, we use environmental sequence data as taxonomical evidence and combine phylogenetic and ecological data to generate and test species hypotheses in the class Archaeorhizomycetes (Taphrinomycotina, Ascomycota).

Distribution patterns of fungal taxa and inferred functional traits reflect the non-uniform vertical stratification of soil microhabitats in a coastal pine forest.

In boreal systems, soil profiles typically consist of distinct stratified horizons, with organic layers at the surface overlying deeper mineral horizons providing microhabitat variation along a depth gradient, and vertical stratification of fungal communities along such soil profiles is commonly observed. We studied fungal community structure in a coastal pine forest along a gradient of decreasing influence from the coast. In this system, the vertical stratification pattern of soil microhabitats (defined here as organic, mineral with roots and mineral without roots: O, MR and MN, respectively) is non-uniform; organic horizons are sometimes buried under drifting sand dunes.

Toward a stable classification of genera within the Entolomataceae: a phylogenetic re-evaluation of the Rhodocybe-Clitopilus clade.

Despite the recent molecular systematic analyses of the Entolomataceae (Agaricales, Basidiomycota), a robust classification of genera supported by morphological and phylogenetic evidence remains unresolved for this cosmopolitan family of pink-spored fungi. Here, a phylogenetic analysis for one of the two major clades (Rhodocybe-Clitopilus) was conducted using three nuclear protein-coding gene regions, the mitochondrial ATP synthase subunit 6 (atp6), the nuclear RNA polymerase subunit II (rpb2) and the nuclear translation elongation factor subunit 1-α (tef1). Five monophyletic groups are resolved with strong statistical support and a set of morphological features for delineation of genera is presented.