Fungal diversity in deep-sea sediments of a hydrothermal vent system in the Southwest Indian Ridge

Deep-sea hydrothermal sediment is known to support remarkably diverse microbial consortia. In deep sea environments, fungal communities remain less studied despite their known taxonomic and functional diversity. High-throughput sequencing methods have augmented our capacity to assess eukaryotic diversity and their functions in microbial ecology. Here we provide the first description of the fungal community diversity found in deep sea sediments collected at the Southwest Indian Ridge (SWIR) using culture-dependent and high throughput sequencing approaches. A total of 138 fungal isolates were cultured from seven different sediment samples using various nutrient media, and these isolates were identified to 14 fungal taxa, including 11 Ascomycota taxa (7 genera) and 3 Basidiomycota taxa (2 genera) based on internal transcribed spacers (ITS1, ITS2 and 5.8S) of rDNA. Using illumina HiSeq sequencing, a total of 757,467 fungal ITS2 tags were recovered from the samples and clustered into 723 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) belonging to 79 taxa (Ascomycota and Basidiomycota contributed to 99% of all samples) based on 97% sequence similarity. Results from both approaches suggest that there is a high fungal diversity in the deep-sea sediments collected in the SWIR and fungal communities were shown to be slightly different by location, although all were collected from adjacent sites at the SWIR. This study provides baseline data of the fungal diversity and biogeography, and a glimpse to the microbial ecology associated with the deep-sea sediments of the hydrothermal vent system of the Southwest Indian Ridge.