Dr Camille Truong1, Dr Christopher J. Jackson1, Dr Naveed Davoodian1, Dr Tom W. May1, Dr. Matthew J. Bruce2, Dr. Steve J. Sinclair2, Mr. Matt D. White2
1Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria, Melbourne, Australia, 2Arthur Rylah Institute for Environmental Research, Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning (DELWP), Heidelberg, Australia
Soil meta-barcoding has revolutionized our views of fungal diversity and brought the potential to monitor ecosystem functions and soil health. Because the universal fungal barcode (ITS rDNA) is a non-coding region, a careful interpretation of meta-barcoding ITS data is necessary to capture the diversity of complex soil fungal communities. We generated ITS1 amplicons from soil samples collected in 106 sites throughout the state of Victoria. Combining this dataset with data from the Australian Microbiome Initiative, we analysed changes in soil fungal communities across different habitats and identified environmental predictors of fungal diversity and functions. We also assessed potential pitfalls in analyzing soil fungi from short reads Illumina MiSeq. In particular, we will discuss the risk of over-estimating fungal diversity from sequencing errors, index bleed and variation in read size, as well as issues in applying existing species names to ITS1 amplicons.
Biography:
Camille Truong is a Research Scientist at the Royal Botanic Gardens Victoria and Honorary Senior Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She did her PhD at the University of Geneva and was a postdoctoral/research fellow at Duke University, University of Florida and the National Autonomous University of Mexico. Her research focuses on ectomycorrhizal associations and the functional role of fungi in forest soils. She is the founder of the video blog “What we are reading” for the International Mycorrhiza Society and also act in the board of the Mycological Society of America.