Uncultivated Fungi from Antarctica

Abstract

Fungi can colonize a wide variety of substrates in the Antarctic environment and have been found in diverse habitats on this continent. These fungi are often described by traditional microbiological methods. However, it is thought that a small fraction of the total fungal diversity can be recovered by isolation and cultivation techniques, and most species have been hitherto unculturable. Cultivation-independent methods have been proposed to be more accurate in describing fungal diversity and include a variety of techniques, such as scanning electron microscopy, fluorescence microscopy, microarray, and quantification analysis of ergosterol. In recent decades, molecular techniques, such as PCR amplification of the 18S and/or 28S rRNA gene region combined with fingerprint methods, clone libraries, and quantitative PCR, have mainly been developed in clinical microbiology. These approaches have been shown to be more informative, precise, reproducible, and faster compared with previous methods and, consequently, have been widely employed for describing fungal communities. More recently, next-generation sequencing has been widely used to study Antarctic fungal communities in diverse sample types, including arid and maritime soil, wood structures and soils at historic sites, rocks and stones, lichens, permafrost and active layer in permafrost, accretion ice from lakes, water from ice-covered lakes, hypersaline brines, and snow. In this chapter, we mainly focus on the fungal diversity characterized to date in Antarctic samples using cultivation-independent methods. An understanding of uncultured fungi can contribute to the elucidation of microbial functions and interactions that are responsible for maintaining life in extreme conditions.