Diversity of glomeromycota, basidiomycetous yeasts and genes encoding laccase like multicopper oxidases along land use gradients at the German biodiversity exploratories

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Dominik Begerow; Professor Dr. Francois Buscot
• Subject Area: Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems
• Term: from 2007 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 37884674

Diversity of soil fungi is weakly explored although they associate with all organism groups and rule element cycling in soils. Its study is now enabled by molecular techniques such as the polymerase chain reaction, which however is time and money consuming, introduces biases and doesn’t allow to separate the active fraction of the soil fungi. The present project explores a strategy consisting in screening metagenomic libraries obtained from soils taken along gradients of land use for filtering targets with differential presence. The targets will belong to the glomeromycota, a fungal group building mycorrhizal symbioses with most land plants and to the basidiomycetous yeasts, a group of unicellular soil fungi. Also genes encoding for laccase like multi copper oxydases, i.e. proteins involved in soil organic matter turnover, will be screened in fungi and bacteria. Full sequencing of the inserts harbouring the targets will provide knowledge on wide genomic regions of the fungi. Once selected, the targets will serve to design biochips for analysing spatio-temporal variations in different soil horizons in the three German biodiversity exploratories and the approach can serve for further fungal groups. The analyses will be paralleled by determining the microbial biomass and the bacterial and fungal fractions using phospholipid fatty acids profiling.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants