Fungal community analysis in the deep-sea sediments of the Pacific Ocean assessed by comparison of ITS, 18S and 28S ribosomal DNA regions

We investigated the diversity of fungal communities in 6 different deep-sea sediment samples of the Pacific Ocean based on three different types of clone libraries, including internal transcribed spacer (ITS), 18S rDNA, and 28S rDNA regions. A total of 1978 clones were generated from 18 environmental clone libraries, resulting in 140 fungal operational taxonomic units (OTUs), including 18 OTUs from ITS, 44 OTUs from 18S rDNA, and 78 OTUs from 28S rDNA gene primer sets. The majority of the recovered sequences belonged to diverse phylotypes of the Ascomycota and Basidiomycota. Additionally, our study revealed a total of 46 novel fungal phylotypes, which showed low similarities (<97%) with available fungal sequences in the GenBank, including a novel Zygomycete lineage, suggesting possible new fungal taxa occurring in the deep-sea sediments. The results suggested that 28S rDNA is an efficient target gene to describe fungal community in deep-sea environment.