Local Environmental Conditions Promote High Turnover Diversity of Benthic Deep-Sea Fungi in the Ross Sea (Antarctica).

ABSTRACT: Fungi are a ubiquitous component of marine systems, but their quantitative relevance, biodiversity and ecological role in benthic deep-sea ecosystems remain largely unexplored. In this study, we investigated fungal abundance, diversity and assemblage composition in two benthic deep-sea sites of the Ross Sea (Southern Ocean, Antarctica), characterized by different environmental conditions (i.e., temperature, salinity, trophic availability). Our results indicate that fungal abundance (estimated as the number of 18S rDNA copies g-1) varied by almost one order of magnitude between the two benthic sites, consistently with changes in sediment characteristics and trophic availability. The highest fungal richness (in terms of Amplicon Sequence Variants-ASVs) was encountered in the sediments charac

SUBMITTER: Barone G 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC8781733 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature