ITS-1 versus ITS-2 pyrosequencing: a comparison of fungal populations in truffle grounds

In a recent study pyrosequencing of the ribosomal internal transcribed spacer-1 (ITS-1) has validated the effectiveness of such technology in the survey of soil fungal diversity. Here we compare the two ITS regions, ITS-1 and ITS-2, of the fungal populations occurring in Tuber melanosporum/Quercus pubescens truffle grounds and sampled in two areas, one devoid of vegetation ("burned", brulé in French) where T. melanosporum fruiting bodies are usually collected, and outside the brulé. TS1F/ITS2 and ITS3/ITS4 were used respectively for the amplification of the ITS-1 and ITS-2 regions. Two amplicon libraries were built, one for inside and the other for outside. A set of 15.788 reads was obtained. After the removal of low quality sequences, 3568 and 3156 sequences were obtained from inside the brulé with the ITS-1 and ITS-2 primers respectively. The sequences obtained from outside the brulé were 4490 with the ITS-1 primers and 2432 with the ITS-2 primers. Most of the sequences obtained for both ITS fragments could be attributed to fungal organisms. The pair of primers, ITS1-F/ITS2, was more selective, producing fewer non-fungal sequences (1% inside, 3% outside), in addition to a higher number of sequences, than the pair ITS3/ITS4 (6% inside, 11% outside). Although differences are present in the taxa percentages between ITS-1 and ITS-2, both reveal that Ascomycota were the dominant fungal phylum and that their number decreased moving from inside the brulé to outside, while the number of Basidiomycota increased. Taken together, both the short ITS-1 and ITS-2 reads obtained by the high throughput 454 sequencing provide adequate information for taxon assignment and are suitable to correlate the dynamics of the fungal populations to specific environments.