Co-occurrences enhance our understanding of aquatic fungal metacommunity assembly and reveal potential host-parasite interactions.

ABSTRACT: Our knowledge of aquatic fungal communities, their assembly, distributions and ecological roles in marine ecosystems is scarce. Hence, we aimed to investigate fungal metacommunities of coastal habitats in a subarctic zone (northern Baltic Sea, Sweden). Using a novel joint species distribution model and network approach, we quantified the importance of biotic associations contributing to the assembly of mycoplankton, further, detected potential biotic interactions between fungi-algae pairs, respectively. Our long-read metabarcoding approach identified 493 fungal taxa, of which a dominant fraction (44.4%) was assigned as early-diverging fungi (i.e. Cryptomycota and Chytridiomycota). Alpha diversity of mycoplankton declined and community compositions changed along inlet-bay-offshore transects

SUBMITTER: Vass M 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9621394 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature