Assessing Fungal Biodiversity Using Molecular Markers

TLDR: Construction of sequence databases of different fungal species that have broaden the representation across fungal population by bioinformatics and taxonomic experts is a critical next step towards the assessments of fungal diversity.

Abstract: With an advent of modern molecular markers technology, it has become easier for the rapid identification, characterization and detection of important plant fungus that were previously a major bottleneck to detect by traditional microbiological methods. Present molecular tools in fungal biodiversity can have potential to characterize in very rapid manner by small quantity of DNA/RNA of fungal pathogens in short period. Different molecular markers viz.; RFLP, RAPD, SSR, AFLP, ITS, IGS and other markers have accelerated the identification and characterization of important plant fungus since previous decades. Internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of ribosomal RNA genes is widely accepted technique for explanation of the diversity among fungal communities due to its utility for the identification of fungi to genus/ species taxonomic levels, due to its several important including its high representation in public sequence databases. Investigation of fungal diversity has also promoted since introduction of next-generation DNA sequencing technologies. Presently, high-throughput sequencing techniques are widely adopted by the several researchers for the detection of biodiversity of fungal populations. At present, construction of sequence databases of different fungal species that have broaden the representation across fungal population by bioinformatics and taxonomic experts is a critical next step towards the assessments of fungal diversity.