RESULTS
In the wide range of fungi, the ITS region had shown to have a higher
probability of successful identification and, therefore, was proposed as
the main fungal barcode marker considered the Bar Code of Life (CBOL)
(Schoch et al. 2012). However, for metagenomic data, recovered sequences
from the ITS region are very short and variable. Making this region only
suitable for ASVs identification analysis and not for alignment and
phylogenetic tree analysis. The sequence lengths ranged from 35 to 301
nucleotides. A total of 2,834,735 raw readings were obtained. The
average readings per sample was 141,730. After the cutting and filtering
process, the reads were reduced to an average of 131,813.1 per sample.
Sample location A showed the highest abundance, with an average of 675
ASVs, followed by location B with an average of 626 ASVs. The lowest
abundance of ASVs was found in the sample C with an average of 556 ASVs
per sample (Figure 2).
Analysis of ASVs data revealed the
presence of 12 taxa at the phyla level in soil samples. The most
abundant taxa were Ascomycota, followed by Mortierellomycota,
Basidiomycota and Mucoromycota. At the order level, it was possible to
identify 42 different taxa of which the most abundant one corresponded
to Mortierellales, followed by Hypocreales, andHelotiales. A total of 89 genera were identified and the most
abundant taxa corresponded to Mortierella , followed byFusarium , and Saitozyma .