Growing of Phalaroides arundinacea L. and Bromopsis inermis Leyss for Biofuel Using Sewage Sludge Compost as a Fertilizer.

Bromopsis inermis and Phalaroides arundinacea are increasingly grown not only for feed but also for other purposes, such as obtaining energy. Composting sewage sludge and using such compost to fertilize various plants is also becoming more popular. Therefore, the aim of our study was to investigate how the fertilization of the mentioned plants with sewage sludge compost (SSC) affects the biomass yield and biomass quality of these plants. It was also important to determine whether fertilization with SSC is possible in low-yielding soils of light texture without harming these soils There are no similar studies in Lithuania, and there are very few in Europe and the world. It was found that investigated grasses formed a small biomass DM yield (6.6 t/ha within three years). The biomass of B. inermis and Ph. arundinacea had a very high ash content and concentrations of nitrogen and potassium. This greatly reduced the quality of the biomass of these grasses as a solid biofuel. SSC performed poorly as a fertilizer. Fertilization with 125 t/ha SSC significantly increased the total biomass yield of Ph. arundinacea only. At the same time, using SSC as a fertilizer significantly increased the concentration of Cu, Zn, and Cd in the soil.

Connecting the multiple dimensions of global soil fungal diversity.

How the multiple facets of soil fungal diversity vary worldwide remains virtually unknown, hindering the management of this essential species-rich group. By sequencing high-resolution DNA markers in over 4000 topsoil samples from natural and human-altered ecosystems across all continents, we illustrate the distributions and drivers of different levels of taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity of fungi and their ecological groups. We show the impact of precipitation and temperature interactions on local fungal species richness (alpha diversity) across different climates. Our findings reveal how temperature drives fungal compositional turnover (beta diversity) and phylogenetic diversity, linking them with regional species richness (gamma diversity). We integrate fungi into the principles of global biodiversity distribution and present detailed maps for biodiversity conservation and modeling of global ecological processes.

Global patterns in endemicity and vulnerability of soil fungi.

Fungi are highly diverse organisms, which provide multiple ecosystem services. However, compared with charismatic animals and plants, the distribution patterns and conservation needs of fungi have been little explored. Here, we examined endemicity patterns, global change vulnerability and conservation priority areas for functional groups of soil fungi based on six global surveys using a high-resolution, long-read metabarcoding approach. We found that the endemicity of all fungi and most functional groups peaks in tropical habitats, including Amazonia, Yucatan, West-Central Africa, Sri Lanka, and New Caledonia, with a negligible island effect compared with plants and animals. We also found that fungi are predominantly vulnerable to drought, heat and land-cover change, particularly in dry tropical regions with high human population density. Fungal conservation areas of highest priority include herbaceous wetlands, tropical forests, and woodlands. We stress that more attention should be focused on the conservation of fungi, especially root symbiotic arbuscular mycorrhizal and ectomycorrhizal fungi in tropical regions as well as unicellular early-diverging groups and macrofungi in general. Given the low overlap between the endemicity of fungi and macroorganisms, but high conservation needs in both groups, detailed analyses on distribution and conservation requirements are warranted for other microorganisms and soil organisms.

Highly comparable metabarcoding results from MGI-Tech and Illumina sequencing platforms.

With the developments in DNA nanoball sequencing technologies and the emergence of new platforms, there is an increasing interest in their performance in comparison with the widely used sequencing-by-synthesis methods. Here, we test the consistency of metabarcoding results from DNBSEQ-G400RS (DNA nanoball sequencing platform by MGI-Tech) and NovaSeq 6000 (sequencing-by-synthesis platform by Illumina) platforms using technical replicates of DNA libraries that consist of COI gene amplicons from 120 soil DNA samples. By subjecting raw sequencing data from both platforms to a uniform bioinformatics processing, we found that the proportion of high-quality reads passing through the filtering steps was similar in both datasets. Per-sample operational taxonomic unit (OTU) and amplicon sequence variant (ASV) richness patterns were highly correlated, but sequencing data from DNBSEQ-G400RS harbored a higher number of OTUs. This may be related to the lower dominance of most common OTUs in DNBSEQ data set (thus revealing higher richness by detecting rare taxa) and/or to a lower effective read quality leading to generation of spurious OTUs. However, there was no statistical difference in the ASV and post-clustered ASV richness between platforms, suggesting that additional denoising step in the ASV workflow had effectively removed the 'noisy' reads. Both OTU-based and ASV-based composition were strongly correlated between the sequencing platforms, with essentially interchangeable results. Therefore, we conclude that DNBSEQ-G400RS and NovaSeq 6000 are both equally efficient high-throughput sequencing platforms to be utilized in studies aiming to apply the metabarcoding approach, but the main benefit of the former is related to lower sequencing cost.