Abstract
Fungi play an important role as microbial decomposers of plant litter in streams, forests, grasslands and various other terrestrial and freshwater environments. The most basic parameter to assess their quantitative importance in these ecosystems is fungal biomass. Consequently, various approaches have been used over the past decades to estimate fungal biomass in decomposing plant litter, among which the quantification of ergosterol as a biomarker largely restricted to fungi has been the most popular. This chapter describes a procedure to quantify ergosterol in decomposing leaf litter. The presented method involves hot methanol extraction of lipids from leaves colonized by fungi, followed by solid-phase extraction (SPE), and the purification and quantification of ergosterol by high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with UV detection at 282 nm. Application of the method has been successful in a variety of environments and has shown that fungal growth in leaf litter can lead to a biomass accrual exceeding 15% of total litter dry mass. This finding has been instrumental in demonstrating a key role of fungi in the litter decomposition process.
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Gessner, M.O. (2020). Ergosterol as a Measure of Fungal Biomass. In: Bärlocher, F., Gessner, M., Graça, M. (eds) Methods to Study Litter Decomposition. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30515-4_27
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30515-4_27
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