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Comprehensive knowledge of bacterial ecology mainly in supraglacial habitats is pivotal particularly at the frontier of accelerated glacier retreat. In this study, bacterial diversity and community composition in glacial soil and meltwater runoff at the frontier of Baishui Glacier No.1 were evaluated using high throughput sequencing. Significant variations in the physiochemical parameters formed an ecological gradient between soil and meltwater runoff. Based on the richness and evenness indexes, the bacterial diversity was relatively higher in soil compared with meltwater runoff. Hierarchical clustering and bi-plot ordination revealed that the taxonomic composition of soil samples was highly similar and significantly influenced by the ecological parameters than the meltwater runoff. The overall relative abundance trend of bacterial phyla and genera were greatly varied in soil and water samples. The relative abundance of Proteobacteria was higher in water runoff samples (40.5–87%) compared with soil samples (32–52.7%). Proteobacteria, Firmicutes, and a little part of Cyanobacteria occupied a major portion of water runoff while the soil was dominated by Acidobacteria (6–16.2%), Actinobacteria (5–16%), Bacteroidetes (0.5–8.8%), and Cyanobacteria (0.1–8.3%) besides Proteobacteria and Firmicutes. Higher numbers of biomarkers were found in soil group compared with the water group. The study area is diverse in terms of richness, while community structures are not evenly distributed. This study provides a preliminary understanding of the bacterial diversity and shifts in community structure in soil and meltwater runoff at the frontier of the glacial. The findings revealed that the environmental factors are a significantly strong determinant of bacterial community structures in such a closely linked ecosystem.

High-throughput sequencing approach of the 16S rRNA gene was employed to evaluate the bacterial diversity inhabit in melted water, snow, soil, and rocks samples at the lower altitudes of the Laohug...

Lignocelluloses contained in animal forage cannot be digested by pigs or poultry with 100% efficiency. On contrary, Aspergillus fumigatus, a saprophytic filamentous fungus, is known to harbor 263 glycoside hydrolase encoding genes, suggesting that A. fumigatus is an efficient lignocellulose degrader. Hence the present study uses corn, wheat, or soybean as a sole carbon source to culture A. fumigatus under animal physiological condition to understand how cellulolytic enzymes work together to achieve an efficient degradation of lignocellulose. Our results showed that A. fumigatus produced different sets of enzymes to degrade lignocelluloses derived from corn, wheat, or soybean cell wall. In addition, the cellulolytic enzymes produced by A. fumigatus were stable under acidic condition or at higher temperatures. Using isobaric tags for a relative and absolute quantification (iTRAQ) approach, a total of ∼600 extracellular proteins were identified and quantified, in which ∼50 proteins were involved in lignocellulolysis, including cellulases, hemicellulases, lignin-degrading enzymes, and some hypothetical proteins. Data are available via ProteomeXchange with identifier PXD004670. On the basis of quantitative iTRAQ results, 14 genes were selected for further confirmation by RT-PCR. Taken together, our results indicated that the expression and regulation of lignocellulolytic proteins in the secretome of A. fumigatus were dependent on both nature and complexity of cellulose, thus suggesting that a different enzyme system is required for degradation of different lignocelluloses derived from plant cells. Although A. fumigatus is a pathogenic fungus and cannot be directly used as an enzyme source, as an efficient lignocellulose degrader its strategy to synergistically degrade various lignocelluloses with different enzymes can be used to design enzyme combination for optimal digestion and absorption of corn, wheat, or soybean that are used as forage of pig and poultry.

Filamentous fungi play a dynamic role in health and the environment. In addition, their unique and complex hyphal structures are involved in their morphogenesis, integrity, synthesis, and degradation, according to environmental and physiological conditions and resource availability. However, in biotechnology, it has a great value in the production of enzymes, pharmaceuticals, and food ingredients. The beginning of nomenclature of overall fungi started in early 1990 after which the categorization, interior and exterior mechanism, function, molecular and genetics study took pace. This mini-review has emphasized some of the important aspects of filamentous fungi, their pattern of life cycle, history, and development of different strategic methods applied to exploit this unique organism. New trends and concepts that have been applied to overcome obstacle because of their basic structure related to genomics and systems biology has been presented. Furthermore, the future aspects and challenges that need to be deciphered to get a bigger and better picture of filamentous fungi have been discussed.