Fungal diversity in deep-sea sediments revealed by culture-dependent and culture-independent approaches

Diversity of fungi from deep biosphere is recently gaining an increasing attention. We investigated fungal diversity in two sediment cores ∼40 cmbsf (cm below seafloor) at a depth of ∼5 000 m in the Central Indian Basin (CIB), by culture-dependent as well as culture-independent approaches. This resulted in recovering a total of 19 culturable fungi and 46 operational taxonomic units (OTUs) respectively. Two of the cultured fungi showed similarity to Hortaea werneckii and Aspergillus versicolor , and 11 OTUs from environmental libraries showed high divergence (86–97 %) from the existing sequences in the GenBank (NCBI database). Some of the fungi, such as Cerrena , Hortaea and Aspergillus sp., were recovered by culture-dependent as well as culture-independent approaches. Together, culture-dependent and culture-independent approaches detected a total of 12 distinct fungal genera and 42 OTUs respectively from two sediment cores indicating presence of a high fungal diversity in deep-sea sediments.