Beschreibung:
Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing (HTS) technologies have revolutionizedour understanding of microbial diversity and composition in relation to their environment. HTS-basedcharacterization of metabolically active (RNA-derived) and total (DNA-derived) fungal communitiesin different terrestrial habitats has revealed profound differences in both richness and communitycompositions. However, such DNA- and RNA-based HTS comparisons are widely missing forfungal communities of groundwater aquifers in the terrestrial biogeosphere. Therefore, in thisstudy, we extracted DNA and RNA from groundwater samples of two pristine aquifers in theHainich CZE and employed paired-end Illumina sequencing of the fungal nuclear ribosomal internaltranscribed spacer 2 (ITS2) region to comprehensively test difference/similarities in the “total” and“active” fungal communities. We found no significant differences in the species richness betweenthe DNA- and RNA-derived fungal communities, but the relative abundances of various fungaloperational taxonomic units (OTUs) appeared to differ. We also found the same set of environmentalparameters to shape the “total” and “active” fungal communities in the targeted aquifers. Furthermore,our comparison also underlined that about 30%–40% of the fungal OTUs were only detected inRNA-derived communities. This implies that the active fungal communities analyzed by HTSmethods in the subsurface aquifers are actually not a subset of supposedly total fungal communities.In general, our study highlights the importance of differentiating the potential (DNA-derived) andexpressed (RNA-derived) members of the fungal communities in aquatic ecosystems.