How to know unknown fungi: the role of a herbarium.
File(s)
Published version
Author(s)
Brock, PM
Döring, H
Bidartondo, MI
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
The development of a universal approach to the identification of fungi from the environment is impeded by the limited number and narrow phylogenetic range of the named internal transcribed spacer DNA sequences available on GenBank. The goal here was to assess the potential impact of systematic DNA sequencing from a fungal herbarium collection. DNA sequences were generated from a diverse set of 279 specimens deposited at the fungal herbarium of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew (UK) and bioinformatic analyses were used to study their overlap with the public database. It is estimated that c. 70% of the herbarium taxonomic diversity is not yet represented in GenBank and that a further c. 10% of our sequences match solely to 'environmental samples' or fungi otherwise unidentified. Here it is shown that the unsampled diversity residing in fungal herbaria can substantially enlarge the coverage of GenBank's fully identified sequence pool to ameliorate the problem of environmental unknowns and to aid in the detection of truly novel fungi by molecular data.
Version
Published version
Date Issued
2009
Citation
New Phytologist, 2009, 181 (3), pp.719-724
ISSN
1469-8137
Start Page
719
End Page
724
Journal / Book Title
New Phytologist
Volume
181
Issue
3
Copyright Statement
© The Authors (2008)
Identifier
PII: NPH2703
Source Volume Number
181
Subjects
Fungi
Plants
Sequence Analysis, Protein
Coverage Spatial
England