MOLECULAR DIVERSITY OF POTATO RHIZOSPHERE FUNGI ASSESSED THROUGH 18S rRNA SEQUENCE

Abstract

Fungi play an important role in the soil ecosystem by manipulating the plant growth as well as yield. Only
a small portion of soil fungi can be cultured through customary microbiological techniques yielding limited information
on the composition and dynamics of soil fungal communities. We tested the potentiality of variable region (V4 and V5)
of 18s rDNA of the fungi using 10 primers targeting the region. Cloning and sequencing of the targeted sequence was
followed and diversity was analysed based on the sequence variation. Primers nu-SSU-0817 and nu-SSU-1196 gave the best
results yielding amplicon size of 420-450 bp. Further, sequence and phylogenetic analyses revealed their distribution among
four phyla i.e., Ascomycota, Basidiomycota, Chytridiomycota and Zygomycota along with a small portion representing
arthropods and protistans as well. The study revealed, phylogentic relations and novel insights to assess biodiversity of
fungal community inhabiting the potato rhizosphere and the selected primers are well suited to study the fungal diversity