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Fungal identification biases in microbiome projects
Author(s) -
Tedersoo Leho,
Lindahl Björn
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
environmental microbiology reports
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.229
H-Index - 69
ISSN - 1758-2229
DOI - 10.1111/1758-2229.12438
Subject(s) - biology , microbiome , identification (biology) , eukaryote , amplicon , computational biology , fungal diversity , archaea , ecosystem , biodiversity , ecology , evolutionary biology , microbiology and biotechnology , genetics , gene , polymerase chain reaction , genome
Summary Fungi are the key players in ecosystems as well as in plant and human health. High‐throughput molecular identification of fungi has greatly progressed our understanding about the diversity of mutualists, saprotrophs, and pathogens. We argue that the methods promoted by the microbiome consortia are suboptimal for detection of the most important fungal pathogens and ecologically important degraders. We recommend several sets of optimized primers for analysis of fungi or all eukaryote groups based on either short or long amplicons that cover the ITS region as well as part of 18S and 28S rDNA.