Climate-driven shifts in plant and fungal communities can lead to topsoil carbon loss in alpine ecosystems.

Alpine tundra ecosystems suffer from ongoing warming-induced tree encroachment and vegetation shifts. While the effects of tree line expansion on the alpine ecosystem receive a lot of attention, there is also an urgent need for understanding the effect of climate change on shifts within alpine vegetation itself, and how these shifts will consequently affect soil microorganisms and related ecosystem characteristics such as carbon storage. For this purpose, we explored relationships between climate, soil chemistry, vegetation, and fungal communities across seven mountain ranges at 16 alpine tundra locations in Europe. Among environmental factors, our data highlighted that plant community composition had the most important influence on variation in fungal community composition when considered in combination with other factors, while climatic factors had the most important influence solely. According to our results, we suggest that rising temperature, associated with a replacement of ericoid-dominated alpine vegetation by non-mycorrhizal or arbuscular mycorrhizal herbs and grasses, will induce profound changes in fungal communities toward higher dominance of saprotrophic and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi at the expense of fungal root endophytes. Consequently, topsoil fungal biomass and carbon content will decrease.

Transcriptomic markers of fungal growth, respiration and carbon-use efficiency.

Fungal metabolic carbon acquisition and its subsequent partitioning between biomass production and respiration, i.e. the carbon-use efficiency (CUE), are central parameters in biogeochemical modeling. However, current available techniques for estimating these parameters are all associated with practical and theoretical shortcomings, making assessments unreliable. Gene expression analyses hold the prospect of phenotype prediction by indirect means, providing new opportunities to obtain information about metabolic priorities. We cultured four different fungal isolates (Chalara longipes, Laccaria bicolor, Serpula lacrymans and Trichoderma harzianum) in liquid media with contrasting nitrogen availability and measured growth rates and respiration to calculate CUE. By relating gene expression markers to measured carbon fluxes, we identified genes coding for 1,3-ß-glucan synthase and 2-oxoglutarate dehydrogenase as suitable markers for growth and respiration, respectively, capturing both intraspecific variation as well as within-strain variation dependent on growth medium. A transcript index based on these markers correlated significantly with differences in CUE between the fungal isolates. Our study paves the way for the use of these markers to assess differences in growth, respiration and CUE in natural fungal communities, using metatranscriptomic or the RT-qPCR approach.

Datamining and functional environmental genomics reassess the phylogenetics and functional diversity of fungal monosaccharide transporters.

Sugar transporters are essential components of carbon metabolism and have been extensively studied to control sugar uptake by yeasts and filamentous fungi used in fermentation processes. Based on published information on characterized fungal sugar porters, we show that this protein family encompasses phylogenetically distinct clades. While several clades encompass transporters that seemingly specialized on specific "sugar-related" molecules (e.g., myo-inositol, charged sugar analogs), others include mostly either mono- or di/oligosaccharide low-specificity transporters. To address the issue of substrate specificity of sugar transporters, that protein primary sequences do not fully reveal, we screened "multi-species" soil eukaryotic cDNA libraries for mannose transporters, a sugar that had never been used to select transporters. We obtained 19 environmental transporters, mostly from Basidiomycota and Ascomycota. Among them, one belonged to the unusual "Fucose H+ Symporter" family, which is only known in Fungi for a rhamnose transporter in Aspergillus niger. Functional analysis of the 19 transporters by expression in yeast and for two of them in Xenopus laevis oocytes for electrophysiological measurements indicated that most of them showed a preference for D-mannose over other tested D-C6 (glucose, fructose, galactose) or D-C5 (xylose) sugars. For the several glucose and fructose-negative transporters, growth of the corresponding recombinant yeast strains was prevented on mannose in the presence of one of these sugars that may act by competition for the binding site. Our results highlight the potential of environmental genomics to figure out the functional diversity of key fungal protein families and that can be explored in a context of biotechnology. KEY POINTS: • Most fungal sugar transporters accept several sugars as substrates. • Transporters, belonging to 2 protein families, were isolated from soil cDNA libraries. • Environmental transporters featured novel substrate specificities.

Fungal ecological strategies reflected in gene transcription - a case study of two litter decomposers.

Microbial communities interplay with their environment through their functional traits that can be a response or an effect on the environment. Here, we explore how a functional trait-the decomposition of organic matter, can be addressed based on genetic markers and how the expression of these markers reflect ecological strategies of two fungal litter decomposer Gymnopus androsaceus and Chalara longipes. We sequenced the genomes of these two fungi, as well as their transcriptomes at different steps of Pinus sylvestris needles decomposition in microcosms. Our results highlighted that if the gene content of the two species could indicate similar potential decomposition abilities, the expression levels of specific gene families belonging to the glycoside hydrolase category reflected contrasting ecological strategies. Actually, C. longipes, the weaker decomposer in this experiment, turned out to have a high content of genes involved in cell wall polysaccharides decomposition but low expression levels, reflecting a versatile ecology compare to the more competitive G. androsaceus with high expression levels of keystone functional genes. Thus, we established that sequential expression of genes coding for different components of the decomposer machinery indicated adaptation to chemical changes in the substrate as decomposition progressed.

PCR primers to study the diversity of expressed fungal genes encoding lignocellulolytic enzymes in soils using high-throughput sequencing.

Plant biomass degradation in soil is one of the key steps of carbon cycling in terrestrial ecosystems. Fungal saprotrophic communities play an essential role in this process by producing hydrolytic enzymes active on the main components of plant organic matter. Open questions in this field regard the diversity of the species involved, the major biochemical pathways implicated and how these are affected by external factors such as litter quality or climate changes. This can be tackled by environmental genomic approaches involving the systematic sequencing of key enzyme-coding gene families using soil-extracted RNA as material. Such an approach necessitates the design and evaluation of gene family-specific PCR primers producing sequence fragments compatible with high-throughput sequencing approaches. In the present study, we developed and evaluated PCR primers for the specific amplification of fungal CAZy Glycoside Hydrolase gene families GH5 (subfamily 5) and GH11 encoding endo-ß-1,4-glucanases and endo-ß-1,4-xylanases respectively as well as Basidiomycota class II peroxidases, corresponding to the CAZy Auxiliary Activity family 2 (AA2), active on lignin. These primers were experimentally validated using DNA extracted from a wide range of Ascomycota and Basidiomycota species including 27 with sequenced genomes. Along with the published primers for Glycoside Hydrolase GH7 encoding enzymes active on cellulose, the newly design primers were shown to be compatible with the Illumina MiSeq sequencing technology. Sequences obtained from RNA extracted from beech or spruce forest soils showed a high diversity and were uniformly distributed in gene trees featuring the global diversity of these gene families. This high-throughput sequencing approach using several degenerate primers constitutes a robust method, which allows the simultaneous characterization of the diversity of different fungal transcripts involved in plant organic matter degradation and may lead to the discovery of complex patterns in gene expression of soil fungal communities.

Construction of sized eukaryotic cDNA libraries using low input of total environmental metatranscriptomic RNA.

BACKGROUND: Construction of high quality cDNA libraries from the usually low amounts of eukaryotic mRNA extracted from environmental samples is essential in functional metatranscriptomics for the selection of functional, full-length genes encoding proteins of interest. Many of the inserts in libraries constructed by standard methods are represented by truncated cDNAs due to premature stoppage of reverse transcriptase activity and preferential cloning of short cDNAs. RESULTS: We report here a simple and cost effective technique for preparation of sized eukaryotic cDNA libraries from as low as three microgram of total soil RNA dominated by ribosomal and bacterial RNA. cDNAs synthesized by a template switching approach were size-fractionated by two dimensional agarose gel electrophoresis prior to PCR amplification and cloning. Effective size selection was demonstrated by PCR amplification of conserved gene families specific of each size class. Libraries of more than one million independent inserts whose sizes ranged between one and four kb were thus produced. Up to 80% of the insert sequences were homologous to eukaryotic gene sequences present in public databases. CONCLUSIONS: A simple and cost effective technique has been developed to construct sized eukaryotic cDNA libraries from environmental samples. This technique will facilitate expression cloning of environmental eukaryotic genes and contribute to a better understanding of basic biological and/or ecological processes carried out by eukaryotic microbial communities.

Widespread occurrence of expressed fungal secretory peroxidases in forest soils.

Fungal secretory peroxidases mediate fundamental ecological functions in the conversion and degradation of plant biomass. Many of these enzymes have strong oxidizing activities towards aromatic compounds and are involved in the degradation of plant cell wall (lignin) and humus. They comprise three major groups: class II peroxidases (including lignin peroxidase, manganese peroxidase, versatile peroxidase and generic peroxidase), dye-decolorizing peroxidases, and heme-thiolate peroxidases (e.g. unspecific/aromatic peroxygenase, chloroperoxidase). Here, we have repeatedly observed a widespread expression of all major peroxidase groups in leaf and needle litter across a range of forest ecosystems (e.g. Fagus, Picea, Acer, Quercus, and Populus spp.), which are widespread in Europe and North America. Manganese peroxidases and unspecific peroxygenases were found expressed in all nine investigated forest sites, and dye-decolorizing peroxidases were observed in five of the nine sites, thereby indicating biological significance of these enzymes for fungal physiology and ecosystem processes. Transcripts of selected secretory peroxidase genes were also analyzed in pure cultures of several litter-decomposing species and other fungi. Using this information, we were able to match, in environmental litter samples, two manganese peroxidase sequences to Mycena galopus and Mycena epipterygia and one unspecific peroxygenase transcript to Mycena galopus, suggesting an important role of this litter- and coarse woody debris-dwelling genus in the disintegration and transformation of litter aromatics and organic matter formation.