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Fungi Sailing the Arctic Ocean: Speciose Communities in North Atlantic Driftwood as Revealed by High-Throughput Amplicon Sequencing

  • Fungal Microbiology
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Abstract

High amounts of driftwood sail across the oceans and provide habitat for organisms tolerating the rough and saline environment. Fungi have adapted to the extremely cold and saline conditions which driftwood faces in the high north. For the first time, we applied high-throughput sequencing to fungi residing in driftwood to reveal their taxonomic richness, community composition, and ecology in the North Atlantic. Using pyrosequencing of ITS2 amplicons obtained from 49 marine logs, we found 807 fungal operational taxonomic units (OTUs) based on clustering at 97 % sequence similarity cut-off level. The phylum Ascomycota comprised 74 % of the OTUs and 20 % belonged to Basidiomycota. The richness of basidiomycetes decreased with prolonged submersion in the sea, supporting the general view of ascomycetes being more extremotolerant. However, more than one fourth of the fungal OTUs remained unassigned to any fungal class, emphasising the need for better DNA reference data from the marine habitat. Different fungal communities were detected in coniferous and deciduous logs. Our results highlight that driftwood hosts a considerably higher fungal diversity than currently known. The driftwood fungal community is not a terrestrial relic but a speciose assemblage of fungi adapted to the stressful marine environment and different kinds of wooden substrates found in it.

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Acknowledgements

The Norwegian marine biobank, Marbank, provided logistic support and University of Tromsø the Arctic University of Norway and University of Oslo financial support. Rahman Mankettikkara kindly provided temperature and salinity data, Michael Greenacre statistical advice. Analyses were partly run on the Lifeportal and the Abel Cluster (http://www.uio.no/english/services/it/research/hpc/) at the University of Oslo.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Tromsø University Museum, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway

    Teppo Rämä, Geir H. Mathiassen & Inger G. Alsos

  2. Marbio, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, Norway

    Teppo Rämä

  3. Section for Genetics and Evolutionary Biology, Department of Biosciences, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Marie L. Davey, Jenni Nordén, Rakel Blaalid & Håvard Kauserud

  4. Department of Ecology and Natural Resource Management, Norwegian University of Life Sciences, Ås, Norway

    Marie L. Davey

  5. University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS), Svalbard, Norway

    Marie L. Davey

  6. Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Jenni Nordén & Rune Halvorsen

  7. Norwegian Institute for Nature Research, Oslo, Norway

    Jenni Nordén

  8. Haukeland University Hospital, Bergen, Norway

    Rakel Blaalid

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  1. Teppo Rämä
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  2. Marie L. Davey
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Fig. S1

Occurrence of the 50 most frequent OTUs in the 44 logs included in the community analysis (PDF 453 kb)

Table S1

Explanatory variables recorded for the driftwood logs, their explanation and statistical properties (PDF 195 kb)

Table S2

Measured values of explanatory variables for the 44 logs included in the community analyses (XLSX 18 kb)

Table S3

OTU matrix used in the community analyses (XLSX 81 kb)

Table S4

OTU identities (XLSX 138 kb)

Table S5

Generalised linear modelling (GLM) analyses of fungal group richness in driftwood logs (PDF 281 kb)

Table S6

Relationships between global nonmetric multidimensional scaling (GNMDS) ordination axes for fungal communities in 44 driftwood logs and explanatory variables (DOCX 16 kb)

Appendix S1

Supplementary methods (DOCX 159 kb)

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Rämä, T., Davey, M.L., Nordén, J. et al. Fungi Sailing the Arctic Ocean: Speciose Communities in North Atlantic Driftwood as Revealed by High-Throughput Amplicon Sequencing. Microb Ecol 72, 295–304 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-016-0778-9

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