Sara Branco

TL;DR: Fungi typically live in highly diverse communities composed of multiple ecological guilds, and FUNGuild is a tool that can be used to taxonomically parse fungal OTUs by ecological guild independent of sequencing platform or analysis pipeline.

TL;DR: ITSx is introduced, a Perl‐based software tool to extract ITS1, 5.8S and ITS2 – as well as full‐length ITS sequences – from both Sanger and high‐throughput sequencing data sets, and is rich in features and written to be easily incorporated into automated sequence analysis pipelines.

TL;DR: This work isolates different geographic and local processes hypothesized to shape fungal community composition and activity in pine forests across the continental United States and shows that the principal ecological processes controlling community structure and function operate at different scales.

TL;DR: GenBank, the public repository for nucleotide and protein sequences, is a critical resource for molecular biology, evolutionary biology, and ecology as discussed by the authors, and some attention has been drawn to sequence errors ([1][1]), common annotation errors also reduce the value of this database.

TL;DR: It is found that ECM and saprotroph richness did not show spatial structure and did not co-vary with any soil resource, and enzymatic activity on ECM root tips took from the same soil cores used for bulk enzyme analysis did not correlate with the activity of any enzyme measured in the bulk soil, suggesting that ECm contributions to larger-scale soil C and nutrient cycling may occur primarily via extramatrical hyphae outside the rhizosphere.