Metabarcoding assessment of fungal diversity in brown algae and sponges of Mauritius

Abstract

Marine fungi are largely associated with second most inhabitants of the marine ecosystem such as sponges and algae. They are important colonizers and play vital ecological roles, such as nutrient cycling, organic matter decomposition, and symbiosis with other organisms. High throughput sequencing methods have been used successfully to reveal unknown fungal communities associated with a number of hosts particularly in the marine environment. However, the diversity of marine fungi associated with sponges and brown algae in Mauritius remains largely unknown. Traditional methods based on culturing do not provide reliable estimate of fungal diversity as only those that are able to grow under laboratory conditions are dominant; in addition, a large proportion of fungi, cultured in vitro remain most of the time unidentifiable, given that there are no sporulating structures to be examined morphologically. To overcome these limitations, we employed Illumina sequencing to unravel fungi species present in the sponges, Iotrochota sp. and Biemna sp. and the brown algae Turbinaria conoides, Sargassum pfeifferae, and Sargassum obovatum, collected from the north of Mauritius. Diversity analyses revealed that Biemna sp. had the highest diversity from the sampled sponges with fungi from 24 orders being recovered while from brown algae; Turbinaria conoides had the highest diversity with recovery of fungal taxa of the orders Botryosphaeriales, Chaetothyriales, Eurotiales, Hypocreales, and Mucorales with the latter four orders being common in both sampled algae and sponges. Beta diversity analyses revealed clustering only in the algae, Turbinaria conoides, and Sargassum pfeifferae and not in the co-occurring sponges, indicating that sampling location did not have much influence on fungal diversity. Our findings provide the first amplicon sequencing based insights of the fungal communities associated with macro-algae and sponges in Mauritius and supplements research on the fungal community existing in the oceans around the world.

Endophytic fungi: A future prospect for breast cancer therapeutics and drug development

“…Genetic engineering approaches modify fungi to reduce dependency on specific signals or adapt to available nutrients, while synthetic biology techniques engineer strains with enhanced growth characteristics. Omics technologies, including metagenomics and transcriptomics, guide media formulation and cultivation design by elucidating metabolic pathways and environmental requirements [ 360 ]. Proteomics analyses identify key proteins crucial for adaptation to artificial growth conditions.…”

“…Collaboration across academia, industry, and government sectors can foster innovation and facilitates the translation of research findings into practical solutions for industrial biotechnology applications. Through these multidisciplinary efforts, researchers can aim to surmount the challenges and realize the full potential of fungal endophytes for sustainable production of natural compounds [ [354] , [355] , [356] , [357] , [358] , [359] , [360] , [361] ].…”

18S rDNA gene metabarcoding of microeukaryotes and epi‐endophytes in the holobiome of seven species of large brown algae

“…Fungi associated with brown algae can have a wide variety of effects on their hosts, from detrimental to beneficial (Suryanarayanan, 2012, and references therein). Two of the Ascomycota OTUs clustered with taxa known to be parasites of brown algae such as Hypocreales and Acremonium (Vicente et al, 2021;Wong Chin et al, 2022;Figure 4). Several of the basidiomycete OTUs clustered with reference sequences related to Cryptococcus and Cystofilobasidium that have previously been found associated with various marine invertebrates, algae, and seaweeds, and as parasites on other fungi (Figure 4; Duarte et al, 2013;Lo Giudice et al, 2019;Ogaki et al, 2019;Vaca et al, 2012).…”