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New Perspectives on the Distribution and Roles of Thermophilic Fungi

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Fungi in Extreme Environments: Ecological Role and Biotechnological Significance

Abstract

Defined as fungi that grow better at 25 °C than at 45 °C, thermophilic fungi were discovered more than a century ago. Nevertheless, little is known about the natural roles and distribution of these organisms. Although common in “sun-heated soils” and other natural substrates they have most often been recovered from manmade composts, and one hypothesis suggests that they evolved as decomposers in natural compost. This hypothesis suggests that propagules found outside compost have been dispersed by wind, an idea that seems nearly impossible to reconcile with their high frequency and broad distribution. In this chapter we briefly review the biology, history, and evolution of thermophilic fungi. We also present new results from ongoing efforts to map the range of habitats from which thermophilic fungi can be obtained. We have isolated thermophilic fungi over small and large spatial scales. Our surveys have focused on soil, litter, and herbivore droppings sampled from diverse ecosystems (deserts, grasslands, and forests) across eight western states, Mexico and Canada—from southern deserts to alpine ecosystems in Colorado and Montana. Our results show that thermophiles can be isolated readily from all of these substrates at nearly every latitude and elevation. We observed that the success of recovering thermophilic fungi from soil decreases with increasing latitude. During this survey, we also discovered that several species of thermophilic fungi can survive storage in soil samples for several years at −80 °C.

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Acknowledgements

This research was supported in part by a National Science Foundation award to the University of New Mexico (UNM) for the Sevilleta Long-Term Ecological Research program. We acknowledge support for DNA sequencing from the UNM Department of Biology’s Molecular Biology Facility. Data analysis was aided by computing resources of the UNM Center for Evolutionary & Theoretical Immunology (CETI) under National Institutes of Health grant P30GM110907, and the UNM Center for Advanced Research Computing, supported in part by the National Science Foundation.

Funding statement Sandia National Laboratories is a multimission laboratory managed and operated by National Technology and Engineering Solutions of Sandia, LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Honeywell International, Inc., for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration under contract DE-NA0003525.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Biology, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA

    Miriam I. Hutchinson & Donald O. Natvig

  2. Sandia National Laboratories, Albuquerque, NM, USA

    Amy J. Powell

  3. Mercy College, Dobbs Ferry, NY, USA

    José Herrera

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  1. Miriam I. Hutchinson
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  2. Amy J. Powell
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  3. José Herrera
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  4. Donald O. Natvig
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Natural Sciences, University of Michigan-Dearborn, Dearborn, MI, USA

    Sonia M. Tiquia-Arashiro

  2. Institute of Biology, University of Graz, Graz, Austria

    Martin Grube

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Hutchinson, M.I., Powell, A.J., Herrera, J., Natvig, D.O. (2019). New Perspectives on the Distribution and Roles of Thermophilic Fungi. In: Tiquia-Arashiro, S., Grube, M. (eds) Fungi in Extreme Environments: Ecological Role and Biotechnological Significance. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-19030-9_4

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