Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.
Abstract
Nematodes and fungi are both ubiquitous in marine environments, yet few studies have investigated relationships between these two groups. Microbial species share many well-documented interactions with both free-living and parasitic nematode species, and limited data from previous studies have suggested ecological associations between fungi and nematodes in benthic marine habitats. This study aimed to further document the taxonomy and distribution of fungal taxa often co-amplified from nematode specimens. A total of 15 fungal 18S rRNA phylotypes were isolated from nematode specimens representing both deep-sea and shallow water habitats; all fungal isolates displayed high pairwise sequence identities with published data in Genbank (99–100%) and unpublished high-throughput 454 environmental datasets (>95%). BLAST matches indicate marine fungal sequences amplified in this study broadly represent taxa within the phyla Ascomycota and Basidiomycota, and several phylotypes showed robust groupings with known taxa in phylogenetic topologies. In addition, some fungal phylotypes appeared to be present in disparate geographic habitats, suggesting cosmopolitan distributions or closely related species complexes in at least some marine fungi. The present study was only able to isolate fungal DNA from a restricted set of nematode taxa; further work is needed to fully investigate the taxonomic scope and function of nematode-fungal interactions.
Publication Date
10-26-2011
Journal Title
PLoS One
Publisher
Public Library of Science
Digital Object Identifier (DOI)
doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0026445
Document Type
Article
Rights
© 2011 Bhadury et al. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Recommended Citation
Bhadury P, Bik H, Lambshead JD, Austen MC, Smerdon GR, et al. (2011) Molecular Diversity of Fungal Phylotypes Co-Amplified Alongside Nematodes from Coastal and Deep-Sea Marine Environments. PLoS ONE 6(10): e26445.