¹State Key Laboratory for Biocontrol and Department of Biochemistry, College of Life Sciences, Zhongshan (Sun Yatsen) University, Guangzhou, PR China

Correspondence: S Zhou, Department of Biochemistry, College of Life Sciences, Zhongshan (Sun Yatsen) University, Guangzhou 510275, PR China. E-mail: caolx@mail.sysu.edu.cn or 126xcao@yahoo.com.cn

²These authors contributed equally to this work.

³Current address: Shenzhen Academy of Metrology and Quality Inspection.

Received 2 April 2007; Revised 21 May 2007; Accepted 31 May 2007; Published online 18 October 2007.

Abstract

To elucidate fungal diversity in methane hydrate-bearing deep-sea marine sediments in the South China Sea, internal transcribed spacer (ITS) regions of rRNA genes from five different sediment DNA samples were amplified and phylogenetically analyzed. Total five ITS libraries were constructed and 413 clones selected randomly were grouped into 24 restriction patterns by Amplified Ribosomal DNA Restriction Analysis (ARDRA). ITS sequences of 44 representative clones were determined and compared with the GenBank database using gapped-BLAST. The phylogenetic analysis showed that the ITS sequences (71–97% similarity) were similar to those of Phoma, Lodderomyces, Malassezia, Cryptococcus, Cylindrocarpon, Hortaea, Pichia, Aspergillus and Candida. The remaining sequences were not associated to any known fungi or fungal sequences in the public database. The results suggested that methane hydrate-bearing deep-sea marine sediments harbor diverse fungi. This is the first report on fungal communities from methane hydrate-bearing deep-sea marine sediments in South China Sea.