Yeasts from tropical forests: Biodiversity, ecological interactions, and as sources of bioinnovation

Abstract

Tropical rainforests and related biomes are found in Asia, Australia, Africa, Central and South America, Mexico, and many Pacific Islands. These biomes encompass less than 20% of Earth's terrestrial area, may contain about 50% of the planet's biodiversity, and are endangered regions vulnerable to deforestation. Tropical rainforests have a great diversity of substrates that can be colonized by yeasts. These unicellular fungi contribute to the recycling of organic matter, may serve as a food source for other organisms, or have ecological interactions that benefit or harm plants, animals, and other fungi. In this review, we summarize the most important studies of yeast biodiversity carried out in these biomes, as well as new data, and discuss the ecology of yeast genera frequently isolated from tropical forests and the potential of these microorganisms as a source of bioinnovation. We show that tropical forest biomes represent a tremendous source of new yeast species. Although many studies, most using culture‐dependent methods, have already been carried out in Central America, South America, and Asia, the tropical forest biomes of Africa and Australasia remain an underexplored source of novel yeasts. We hope that this review will encourage new researchers to study yeasts in unexplored tropical forest habitats.

Lactose-assimilating yeasts with high fatty acid accumulation uncovered by untargeted bioprospecting

“…Tropical rainforests and other species-rich biomes can be found in Asia, Australia, Africa, Central and South America, Mexico, and many Paci c Islands. These biomes cover less than 20% of the Earth's land area but may contain up to 50% of the planet's biodiversity (Dinerstein et (Rosa et al, 2023). As these biomes are under threat due to deforestation (Hoang and Kanemoto, 2021) and environmental changes, it is important to catalog their microbial biodiversity before it is lost.…”

“…Whereas the yeast biodiversity of North America, Europe, and parts of Asia is somewhat well mapped, plenty of niches and geographical locations in the global south remain only super cially explored. These include biodiversity hotspots in tropical Africa and South America that likely hold many new yeast species and lineages with ecologically or industrially interesting traits (Boekhout et al, 2022;Rosa et al, 2023) Novel yeast strains and species can be found through bioprospecting -the systematic and organized search for useful products derived from bioresources (Hosseini et al, 2022). Untargeted bioprospecting aims to collect every microbe that grows on non-selective plates in the laboratory, while targeted bioprospecting collects microbes that grow well in a select environment, often of industrial interest.…”

“…In this study, we used untargeted bioprospecting to discover evolutionary diverse yeasts in tropical West Africa, one of the most species-rich but, in terms of yeast, least explored regions (Rosa et al, 2023). Our comprehensive collection of 1996 isolates underwent rigorous high-throughput screening to accurately measure the capacity of each isolate to grow on a broad spectrum of substrates and in conditions capturing the effect of various industrial stress factors.…”

Taxogenomic analyses of Starmerella gilliamiae f.a, sp. nov. and Starmerella monicapupoae f.a., sp. nov., two novel species isolated from plant substrates and insects

“…Species of the genus Starmerella exhibit unusual metabolic traits, such as fructophily and the production of sophorolipids [8]. Most species of the genus have been isolated from bees and substrates visited by these insects, indicating an ecological relationship between the yeasts and the insects [9][10][11][12][13][14]. Associations between stingless bees or honeybees and species of the genus Starmerella have been reported in recent works.…”

Yeast Diversity in Honey Produced by Wild Honeybees at Different Elevations

“…Many places and ecosystems remain unexplored despite geographical assessments of yeast biodiversity spanning various regions 11 . Large biomes such as tropical rainforests, montane, and sub-montane ecosystems have been understudied 12 .…”