A collection of isolates from natural environments in Sardinia reveals a complex virome that includes negative-sense fungal viruses with unprecedented genome organizations.

genus includes soil-inhabiting fungi that provide important ecosystem services in their interaction with plants and other fungi, as well as biocontrol of fungal plant diseases. A collection of isolates from Sardinia has been previously characterized, but here we selected 113 isolates, representatives of the collection, and characterized their viral components. We carried out high-throughput sequencing of ribosome-depleted total RNA following a bioinformatics pipeline that detects virus-derived RNA-directed RNA polymerases (RdRps) and other conserved viral protein sequences.