ORIGINAL RESEARCH
Industrial Effluents Harbor a Unique
Diversity of Fungal Community Structures
as Revealed by High-throughput Sequencing
Analysis
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1
Department of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, UNISA Florida Campus, Florida, South Africa
2
Department of Biological Sciences, University of Namibia, Windhoek, Namibia
3
Center for Ecological Genomics and Wildlife Conservation, Department of Zoology,
University of Johannesburg, South Africa
Submission date: 2018-03-23
Final revision date: 2018-05-01
Acceptance date: 2018-05-06
Online publication date: 2019-01-29
Publication date: 2019-03-01
Pol. J. Environ. Stud. 2019;28(4):2353-2362
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TOPICS
ABSTRACT
The actual extent of fungal diversity in different environmental media is still a subject of ongoing
research. Little is currently known about the diversity of fungal populations in industrial streams.
This study characterized the fungal diversity of different industrial effluents using a high-throughput
sequencing approach. A total of 234617 quality filtered reads were obtained from the collected wastewater
samples. Phylogenetic taxonomy revealed that resident fungal communities were classified as 6 phyla,
31 classes, 79 orders, 144 families, and 192 genera. Ascomycota and Basidiomycota were the most
dominant phyla whose relative abundance ranged from 23.29% to 38.31%, and 17.34% to 33.51%,
respectively. Recovered operational taxonomic units (OTUs) ranged from 292 (Dixon) to 427
(Capegate). The existence of some fungal genera identified in the industrial wastewaters correlated
to physicochemical variables and had the potential to play important roles in organic decomposition,
pollutant degradation, and xenobiotic transformation. Meanwhile, the occurrence of unclassified
fungal sequences (22.5% to 33.09%) suggests that these effluents are a potential reservoir of as-yet
uncharacterized fungal species.