Alterations of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungal Diversity in Soil with Elevation in Tropical Forests of China

Abstract

Mycorrhizas play a vital role in ecosystem function, diversity and productivity. However, mycorrhizas in tropical forests are considered to be a neglected area of research in contrast to the well-studied diversity patterns of macro organisms. To this end, soil samples from 0 to 30 cm in depth were collected from six or four elevations in a typical tropical forest of Mt. Jianfeng and Mt. Diaoluo in China. The arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal (AMF) diversity and community composition were explored among different elevations based on high-throughput barcoded sequencing on the Illumina MiSeq platform. Environmental variables of soil characteristics, and elevation on AMF community assembly were analyzed using canonical correspondence analysis. In total, 316 AMF operational taxonomic units (OTUs) were found to belong to four identified and one unclassified order, and Glomus was the most dominant genus in tropical forest. AMF communities or diversity did not clearly reflect local environmental conditions, the spatial distance between mountains and elevation. In total, 68% and 56% of taxa of AMF were observed on multiple elevations in Mt. Jianfeng and Mt. Diaoluo, respectively. Furthermore, 8.9% and 19% of OTUs were exhibited on all elevations in Mt. Jianfeng and Mt. Diaoluo, respectively. The AMF alpha diversity, richness and evenness were similar across the two surveyed tropical mountains. The influence of elevation showed no distinct role on the diversity of AMF taxa. Overall, AMF communities and diversity are abundant in tropical forests and with little influence of elevation in tropical forests of China.

Molecular Diversity and Distribution of Arbuscular Mycorrhizal Fungi at Different Elevations in Mt. Taibai of Qinling Mountain

“…In their research Yang W. et al (2016) found that elevation did not significantly affect AMF OTUs richness. In addition, we found that the OTU richness at all altitudes from 49 to 223 was more abundant than those in previous studies ( Liu et al, 2017 ; Shi et al, 2019 ). It can be seen that AMF richness was higher in Mt.…”

“…And altitude had a significant impact on them. However, some studies suggested that AMF evenness was not a significant association with the changes of altitudes ( Li et al, 2014 ; Shi et al, 2019 ). These different results could be caused by many factors.…”

“…AMF OTU richness showed a changing trend of cubic function with the increase of the altitude. Some studies showed that AMF richness decreased with the increase in elevation ( Lugo et al, 2008 ; Shi et al, 2019 ). In their research Yang W. et al (2016) found that elevation did not significantly affect AMF OTUs richness.…”

Alterations to arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal community composition is driven by warming at specific elevations

“…AMF alpha diversity in different elevations were expressed and plotted by the index of Shannon, Ace, and Simpson evenness at the level of OTU by SPASS, Excel and Origin, respectively. The differences of AMF richness and AMF diversity in different elevations were analyzed by two-way ANOVA analysis and Duncan in SPSS 19.0 (Shi et al, 2019). We analyze the impact of environmental factors on AMF community after warming through RDA analysis on the platform of the Majorbio Cloud Platform (www.majorbio.…”

“…PCR reactions were performed in triplicate 20 μL mixture containing 4 μL of 5 × FastPfu Buffer, 2 μL of 2.5 mM dNTPs, 0.8 μL of each primer (5 μM), 0.4 μL of FastPfu Polymerase and 10 ng of template DNA. The second PCR amplication used identical reaction conditions described above with the primers AMDGR (5’-CCCAACTATCCCTATTAATCAT-3’) and AMV4-5NF (5’-AAGCTCGTAGTTGAATTTCG-3’) ( Shi et al, 2019 ), and the following program: 3 min of denaturation at 95 °C, 30 cycles of 30 s at 95 °C, 30 s for annealing at 55 °C, and 45 s for elongation at 72 °C, and a final extension at 72 °C for 10 min. The resulted PCR products were extracted from a 2% agarose gel and further purified using the AxyPrep DNA Gel Extraction Kit (Axygen Biosciences, Union City, CA, USA) and quantified using QuantiFluor™-ST (Promega, Madison, WI, USA) according to the manufacturer’s protocol.…”