Fungal community inhabiting dead branches using high-throughput sequencing

• Grant number: 17/27063-3
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research Internship - Doctorate
• Start date: March 31, 2018
• End date: November 29, 2018
• Field of knowledge: Biological Sciences - Microbiology
• Principal Investigator: Adriana de Mello Gugliotta
• Grantee: Ricardo Matheus Pires
• Supervisor: Rasmus Kjoller
• Host Institution: Instituto de Botânica. São Paulo , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark
• Associated to the scholarship: 15/13240-5 - Analysis of wood decaying in an Atlantic forest fragment: substrate characterization, fungal community structure and succession process, BP.DR

Abstract

In tropical forests, wood is one of the major components of biomass and it retains carbon in form of lignin, cellulose and hemicellulose molecules. Fungi are important organisms that are responsible for degrading these compounds in order to release CO2 back to the atmosphere. The present study aims to identify which fungi species occurs in three species of tree branches during two years of decaying on the ground of an urban tropical forest in São Paulo (Brazil). Using high-throughput sequencing to identify changes in fungal diversity and community structure, is proposed to identify the species at species taxonomic rank or in the most close as possible, resorting techniques of bioinformatics. This study comprises three steps on its execution: (i) grind the samples collected on the main PhD project and extract DNA; (ii) sequence the region ITS2 using Illumina plataform and (iii) data analysis using bioinformatics. (AU)