Assessment of Soil Fungal Diversity at Different Depth in Haibat Sultan Mountain by PCR-Cloning-Sequencing Methods

Understanding the fungal community structure of soil is important for optimizing their role as decomposers in the soil food web. In order to explore the fungal composition and diversity in Haibat Sultan Mountain soil, PCR used based cloning and sequencing of Internal Transcribed Spacer (ITS) of genome. Soil samples were collected from different depth points (1, 5 to 10 cm depth) and fungal universal primers targeting ITS2 region of the fungal genome were used to assess their diversity in soil samples. More than 1400 fungal clones were sequenced and led to detect total of 89 OTUs in all samples. The majority of the Operational Taxonomic Units (OTUs) belong to the Ascomycota (67.4%), the second most constituents of soil samples were Basidiomycota with (28.1%), and few members of Zygomycota were detected. Concluded that fungal richness and diversity were abundant at the depth of 1 cm and reached their peak at the depth of 5 cm, while at the depth of 10 cm, the fungal communities decreased. The highest Chao1 and Shannon value were obtained at the soil depth of 5 cm followed by soil depth 1cm, whereas the lowest value was detected in soil depth 10 cm. Results highlight the variations of fungal diversity at different depth points.  Thus, further studies are needed to expand knowledge about fungi communities in soil through using high-throughput sequencing to improve detection fungi in soil