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Twenty-five cultures of lichenizing fungi available for experimental studies on symbiotic systems

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Abstract

In this study we describe the techniques used to culture 25 mycobionts spanning three classes and five orders of the leotiomyceta (Ascomycota). We find that five media, including potato-carrot, malt extract-yeast extract (MY), Bold’s basal medium with nitrogen (NMBBM), oatmeal, and yeast extract with supplements (YES), are sufficient to induce ascospore germination of many lichenizing fungi and are also suitable for maintaining growth of the culture over the long term. Regular physical disruption of the cultures in liquid media is recommended to stimulate continued growth. Genomes of five of these lichen-forming fungal strains have been sequenced. The identity of each culture was confirmed by sequencing the nuclear ribosomal internal transcribed spacer (ITS) or the mitochondrial small subunit (mitSSU) from each strain. Additionally, the level of sequencing in terms of total number of genes sequenced for each taxon is provided. All fungal cultures have been deposited in public culture collections and, therefore, are available to the scientific community for conducting in vitro experiments.

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Acknowledgments

The authors thank the curators of the herbaria of BCN and DUKE, in addition to Linda Dow, Mark Green, Gary Perlmutter, and Pieter Van den Boom, for providing material used in this study, as well as to Angela Holguin, Martín Ramírez Mejía, and Emilie Lefèvre for help in generating sequences. We gratefully acknowledge Robert Lücking and Eimy Rivas-Plata for substantially helping with taxa identifications. This study was made possible with the support of a postdoctoral grant from the Fulbright Scholar Program and Spanish government, and a fellowship from Fundación Caja Madrid to EG, a grant-in-aid from the Department of Biology at Duke University to TM, as well as a grant from the National Science Foundation Assembling the Tree of Life (DEB-0919455) to FL. This project was also funded in part by a subcontract (112442) to D. Armaleo, Fred Dietrich and FL as part of the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory foundational scientific focus area under the genomic sciences program of the Department of Energy Biological and Environmental Research Program in collaboration with Scott Baker and Jon Magnuson.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Microbiology, University of Minnesota, MMC 196 420 Delaware St. SE, Minneapolis, MN, 55455, USA

    Tami R. McDonald

  2. Biology Department, Duke University, Durham, NC, USA

    Ester Gaya & François Lutzoni

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  1. Tami R. McDonald
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  2. Ester Gaya
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  3. François Lutzoni
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Correspondence to Tami R. McDonald.

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Tami R. McDonald and Ester Gaya were equally contributing authors.

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McDonald, T.R., Gaya, E. & Lutzoni, F. Twenty-five cultures of lichenizing fungi available for experimental studies on symbiotic systems. Symbiosis 59, 165–171 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13199-013-0228-0

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