Abstract
BackgroundMicroorganisms have been able colonize and thrive in environments characterized by low/high pH, temperature, salt or pressure. Examples of extreme environments are the soda lakes and soda deserts. The objective of this study was to explore the fungal diversity across soda lakes Magadi, Elmenteita, Sonachi and Bogoria in Kenya. A new set of primers was designed to amplify a fragment long enough for the 454-pyrosequencing technology. Results Analysis of the amplicons generated showed that the new primers amplified for eukaryotic groups. A total of 153,634 quality-filtered, non-chimeric sequences were used for community diversity analysis. The sequence reads were clustered into 502 operational taxonomic Units (OTUs) at 97% similarity using BLASTn analysis of which 432 were affiliated to known fungal phylotypes and the rest to other eukaryotes. Fungal OTUs were distributed across 107 genera affiliated to the phylum Ascomycota, Basidiomycota, Glomeromycotina and Incertae Sedis. The Phylum Ascomycota was the most abundant phylotype. Overall, fifteen (15) genera (Chaetomium, Monodictys, Arthrinium, Cladosporium, Fusarium, Myrothecium, Phyllosticta, Coniochaeta, Diatrype, Sarocladium, Sclerotinia, Aspergillus, Preussia and Eutypa) accounted for 65.3% of all the reads. The Genus Cladosporium was detected across all the samples at varying percentages with the highest being water from Lake Bogoria (51.4%). Good’s coverage estimator values ranged between 97 and 100%, an indication that the dominant phylotypes were represented in the data. ConclusionThese results provide useful insights that can guide cultivation dependent studies in order to understand the physiology and biochemistry of the as yet uncultured taxa.
Transcriptomic Analysis ofEucryptorrhynchus chinensis(Coleoptera: Curculionidae) Using 454 Pyrosequencing Technology
