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Endophytic fungal communities of Stipa sp. roots in different types of steppes in northern China.

ZHANG Shao-peng1,2, XU Ting1,2, YANG Li-qiang1,2, SONG Yu3, LI Xin-yu1, ZHANG Hui-wen1   

  1. (1State Key Laboratory of Forest and Soil Ecology, Institute of Applied Ecology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Shenyang 110164, China; 2University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100049, China; 3Eastern Liaoning University, Dandong 118003, Liaoning, China)
  • Online:2014-12-18 Published:2014-12-18

Abstract: In order to explore the endophytic fungal communities of Stipa sp. roots in different types of steppes in the north of China, root tissues of Stipa sp. were collected from six different types of steppes, i.e., subalpine meadow, alpine meadow, Gobi desert, desert steppe, typical steppe, and meadow steppe across Xinjiang, Gansu and Inner Mongolia. A total of 213 isolates were obtained and sequenced, which were divided into 51 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) at the 97% similarity threshold and classified to 4 phyla, 7 classes, 23 families and 27 genera. Ascomycota was found to be the predominant flora (93.4% of the total isolates) at the level of phylum and distributed in all the six steppe types. The dominant genera other than Fusarium (41.3 of the total isolates) in the six steppe types were different, such as Microdochium in subalpine meadow, Saccharicola and Aureobasidium in alpine meadow, Curvularia and Rhizopus in Gobi desert and Trichoderma in typical steppe. The endophytic fungal community from the alpine meadow contained the most abundant groups at the level of genus and phylum, and had the highest Margalef index, Shannon index and second highest evenness index after the desert steppe. By contrast, the lowest Margalef index was observed in the desert steppe and the lowest Shannon index and evenness index were found in the typical steppe. Furthermore, endophytic fungal communities from alpine meadow and desert steppe showed low similarity coefficients (0.12-0.25 and 0.13-0.22, respectively) with other steppe types. However, the similarity coefficients among the other four steppe types were relatively high, especially between the typical steppe and the meadow steppe (0.60). Redundancy analysis (RDA) showed that the altitude and latitude were the main environmental factors affecting endophytic fungal community distribution in the roots of Stipa sp. in the six steppe types.