RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Global Patterns in Culturable Soil Yeast Diversity
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 2021.05.19.444851
DO 10.1101/2021.05.19.444851
A1 Himeshi Samarasinghe
A1 Yi Lu
A1 Renad Aljohani
A1 Ahmad Al-Amad
A1 Heather Yoell
A1 Jianping Xu
YR 2021
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2021/05/19/2021.05.19.444851.abstract
AB Yeasts, broadly defined as unicellular fungi, fulfill essential roles in soil ecosystems as decomposers and nutrition sources for fellow soil-dwellers. Broad-scale investigations of soil yeasts pose a methodological challenge as metagenomics are of limited use on this group of fungi. Here we characterize global soil yeast diversity using fungal DNA barcoding on 1473 yeasts cultured from 3826 soil samples obtained from nine countries in six continents. We identify mean annual precipitation and international air travel as two significant predictors of soil yeast community structure and composition worldwide. Anthropogenic influences on soil yeast communities, directly via travel and indirectly via altered rainfall patterns resulting from climate change, are concerning as we found common infectious yeasts frequently distributed in soil in several countries. Our discovery of 41 putative novel species highlights the need to revise the current estimate of ~1500 recognized yeast species. Our findings demonstrate the continued need for culture-based studies to advance our knowledge of environmental yeast diversity.Competing Interest StatementThe authors have declared no competing interest.