Name: isolation of culturable yeasts and molds from soils to investigate fungal population structure
Uploaded: 2022-05-27T13:45:00
Description: Watch this Scientific Journal Video about Isolation of Culturable Yeasts and Molds from Soils to Investigate Fungal Population Structure at JoVE.com

This research was supported by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (Grant No. ALLRP 570780-2021) and McMaster University.

NOTE: Any steps utilizing international soil samples and/or A. fumigatus spores and mycelia require working within a biosafety cabinet for level 2 organisms (BSCII).
1. Isolation of yeast from soil
<ol>
	<li>Preparation of antibacterial and antifungal solutions
	<ol>
		<li>Suspend chloramphenicol powder in 70% ethanol to prepare a 50 g/L stock solution. Sterilize by syringe filtration and store at 4 &#176;C. 
		&#8203;NOTE: This antibiotic will prevent the grow...

<ol>
	<li>Frac, M., Hannula, S. E., Belka, M., J&#553;dryczka, M. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Fungal+biodiversity+and+their+role+in+soil+health.">Fungal biodiversity and their role in soil health.</a> Frontiers in Microbiology. 9, 707 (2018).</li><li>Tedersoo, L., et al. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Global+diversity+and+geography+of+soil+fungi.">Global diversity and geography of soil fungi.</a> Science. 346 (6213), 1256688 (2014).</li><li>Egidi, E., et al. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=A+few+Ascomycota+taxa+dominate+soil+fungal+communities+worldwide.">A few Ascomycota taxa dominate soil fungal communities worldwide.</a> Nature Communications. 10 (1), 1-9 (2019).</li><li>Yurkov, A. 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S. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=A+multivariate+analysis+of+soil+yeasts+isolated+from+a+latitudinal+gradient.">A multivariate analysis of soil yeasts isolated from a latitudinal gradient.</a> Microbial Ecology. 52 (1), 90-103 (2006).</li><li>Kurtzman, C., Fell, J. W., Boekhout, T. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=.">.</a> The Yeasts: A Taxonomic Study. , (2011).</li><li>Samarasinghe, H., et al. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Global+patterns+in+culturable+soil+yeast+diversity.">Global patterns in culturable soil yeast diversity.</a> iScience. 24 (10), 103098 (2021).</li><li>Xu, J. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Fungal+DNA+barcoding.">Fungal DNA barcoding.</a> Genome. 59 (11), 913-932 (2016).</li><li>Samarasinghe, H., Aljohani, R., Jimenez, C., Xu, J. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Fantastic+yeasts+and+where+to+find+them:+the+discovery+of+a+predominantly+clonal+Cryptococcus+deneoformans+population+in+Saudi+Arabian+soils.">Fantastic yeasts and where to find them: the discovery of a predominantly clonal Cryptococcus deneoformans population in Saudi Arabian soils.</a> FEMS Microbiology Ecology. 95 (9), 122 (2019).</li><li>Aljohani, R., Samarasinghe, H., Ashu, T., Xu, J. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Diversity+and+relationships+among+strains+of+culturable+yeasts+in+agricultural+soils+in+Cameroon.">Diversity and relationships among strains of culturable yeasts in agricultural soils in Cameroon.</a> Scientific Reports. 8 (1), 1-11 (2018).</li><li>Carini, P., et al. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Relic+DNA+is+abundant+in+soil+and+obscures+estimates+of+soil+microbial+diversity.">Relic DNA is abundant in soil and obscures estimates of soil microbial diversity.</a> Nature Microbiology. 2 (3), 1-6 (2016).</li><li>Xu, J. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Fungal+species+concepts+in+the+genomics+era.">Fungal species concepts in the genomics era.</a> Genome. 63 (9), 459-468 (2020).</li><li>Brakhage, A. 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F., Xu, J. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Global+population+genetic+analysis+of+Aspergillus+fumigatus.">Global population genetic analysis of Aspergillus fumigatus.</a> mSphere. 2 (1), 00019 (2017).</li><li>Heo, S. T., et al. <a target="_blank" href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PubMed&cmd=Search&doptcmdl=Citation&defaultField=Title+Word&term=Changes+in+in+vitro+ausceptibility+patterns+of+Aspergillus+to+triazoles+and+correlation+with+aspergillosis+outcome+in+a+tertiary+care+cancer+center,+1999-2015.">Changes in in vitro ausceptibility patterns of Aspergillus to triazoles and correlation with aspergillosis outcome in a tertiary care cancer center, 1999-2015.</a> Clinical Infectious Diseases. 65 (2), 216-225 (2017).</li><li>de Valk, H. 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The protocol developed for isolating yeasts and A. fumigatus from soil is a fast and efficient method for high-throughput soil processing and fungal isolation. The protocol only requires a small amount of soil (0.1-0.2 g) per sample, allowing for more sites to be sampled with similar effort. The quick turnaround time ensures that results can be obtained within a short timeframe and allows time for troubleshooting and repeating experiments if necessary. This protocol can be easily replicated across many laborator...

Fungi in soil ecosystems play essential roles in organic matter decomposition, nutrient cycling, and soil fertilization1. Both culture-independent (i.e., high-throughput sequencing) and culture-dependent approaches are widely used in the study of soil fungi2,3. While the large amount of data generated by high-throughput metabarcode sequencing is useful for elucidating broad-scale patterns in community structure and diversity, the culture-dependent approach can provide highly complementary information on the taxonomic and functional structures of fungal communities, as well as more specific profiles of individual organisms through downstream diversity and functional analyses due to the availability of pure fungal cultures.
Despite rarely exceeding thousands of cells per gram of soil, yeasts, broadly defined as unicellular fungi, are essential decomposers and food sources for other soil dwellers4,5. In fact, yeasts may be the predominant soil fungi in cold biospheres such as continental Antarctica6,7. Soil is also a primary reservoir of medically relevant yeasts that cause serious opportunistic infections in humans and other mammals8. Despite morphological similarities, yeast species are phylogenetically diverse and occur among filamentous fungi in two major phyla, Ascomycota and Basidiomycota, within the fungal kingdom9. Yeasts lack a defining DNA signature at the fungal barcoding gene, the internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of the nuclear ribosomal RNA gene cluster10, making them indistinguishable from other fungi in metagenomics investigations and thus necessitating the use of culture-dependent methods to isolate yeast species.
The protocol below was implemented to characterize soil yeast communities of nine countries and identify global trends and patterns in soil yeast diversity9,11,12. Metagenomics approaches are of limited use when studying targeted groups of organisms such as yeasts2,3. Due to their phylogenetic diversity, yeasts cannot be distinguished from other fungi based on DNA sequence alone. Thus, studying yeast populations requires the continued use of culture-dependent isolation. However, culturing is often significantly more time-consuming and requires more personnel to perform the experiments. Therefore, the protocol has been optimized and streamlined for faster processing with limited personnel. The main advantage of culturing is that the yeast species identified are living yeasts and not dead ones, and thus are more likely to be true soil dwellers rather than transient cells present in the soils. It has been estimated that approximately 40% of fungal DNA in soil are either contaminants from other environments, extracellular, or come from cells that are no longer intact, causing high-throughput sequencing approaches to overestimate fungal richness by as much as 55%13. Culture-dependent isolation can readily confirm yeast species identity with the added benefit of securing pure culture to be used in downstream analyses. Indeed, pure cultures of 44 putative new yeast species were identified using this soil isolation protocol that allowed the use of a range of methods to study their taxonomic and functional properties in detail14.
The protocol below can also be used to isolate molds present within soil, such as A. fumigatus. Aspergillus fumigatus is a thermophilic and saprophytic mold with a wide, global distribution in soil15.&#160;It has been isolated from numerous clinical and non-clinical environments. Non-clinical sampling commonly includes air, organic debris (compost, saw dust, tulip bulb waste), and soil (agricultural, garden, and natural soils)16,17,18,19. Aspergillus fumigatus is a human opportunistic pathogen causing a range of infections collectively termed aspergillosis, affecting over 8 million people worldwide16,20. Approximately 300,000 people around the globe suffer from invasive aspergillosis, which is the most severe form of aspergillosis16. Depending on factors such as the patient population, site of infection, and efficacy of antifungal therapy, mortality rate can be as high as 90%. Over the past several decades, resistance to antifungal therapies has increased, requiring global surveillance efforts in both clinical and environmental populations to track these resistance genotypes21,22,23. Given its ability to grow at temperatures upward of 50 &#176;C, this temperature can be exploited to select for A. fumigatus isolates from soil using culture-dependent methods. Aspergillus fumigatus isolates are commonly genotyped at nine highly polymorphic short tandem repeat (STR) loci, shown to have high discriminatory power between strains24. These STR genotypes can be compared to other previously surveyed populations to track the spread of A. fumigatus genotypes, including drug-resistance genes, around the world.
Below we describe a protocol for the speedy isolation of yeasts and A. fumigatus from soil samples in a culture-dependent manner. Depending on the amount of soil obtained per sample, the soil samples can be shared between the two protocols. In comparison to similar methods that isolate yeast and A. fumigatus from soil, this protocol uses 10x less soil per isolate obtained. Studies attempting to isolate A. fumigatus from soil require between 1 and 2 g of soil per isolate, whereas this protocol requires only 0.1-0.2 g of soil18,19,25. This protocol utilizes smaller plastics and containers that facilitate its high-throughput design. Therefore, a larger number of samples can be processed using less space for equipment such as incubators and roller drums. Soil samples can be fully processed to obtain isolates in as little as 7 days. This protocol has been optimized to allow processing of up to 150-200 samples per day per person.

<table border="1" fo:keep-together.within-page="1" fo:keep-with-next.within-page="always">
	<tbody>
		<tr>
			<td>1.5 mL microcentrifuge tube</td>
			<td>Sarstedt Inc</td>
			<td>72.690.001</td>
			<td></td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>Benomyl powder&#160;</td>
			<td>Toronto Research Chemicals</td>
			<td>B161380</td>
			<td></td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>Chloramphenicol powder&#160;</td>
			<td>Sigma-Aldrich</td>
			<td>SKU: C0378-5G</td>
			<td></td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>Dextrose</td>
			<td>Sigma-Aldrich</td>
			<td>SKU: D9434-500G</td>
			<td></td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>Fragment Analysis Software</td>
			<td>NCBI&#39;s Osiris</td>
			<td></td>
			<td>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/osiris/</td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>ITS sequence database</td>
			<td>NCBI GenBank&#160;</td>
			<td></td>
			<td>https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genbank/</td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>ITS sequence database</td>
			<td>UNITE&#160;</td>
			<td></td>
			<td>https://unite.ut.ee/</td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>Peptone</td>
			<td>Sigma-Aldrich</td>
			<td>SKU: P5905-500G</td>
			<td></td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>Reusable cell spreaders&#160;</td>
			<td>Fisher Scientific</td>
			<td>08-100-12</td>
			<td></td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>Sterile 10 cm diameter Petri dishes&#160;</td>
			<td>Sarstedt Inc</td>
			<td>83.3902</td>
			<td></td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>Sterile 13 mL culture tubes&#160;</td>
			<td>Sarstedt Inc</td>
			<td>62.515.006</td>
			<td></td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>Wooden plain-tipped applicator sticks&#160;</td>
			<td>Fisher Scientific</td>
			<td>23-400-112</td>
			<td></td>
		</tr>
		<tr>
			<td>Yeast extract</td>
			<td>Sigma-Aldrich</td>
			<td>SKU: Y1625-250G</td>
			<td></td>
		</tr>
	</tbody>
</table>

isolation of culturable yeasts and molds from soils to investigate fungal population structure

Soil is host to an incredible amount of microbial life, with each gram containing up to billions of bacterial, archaeal, and fungal cells. Multicellular fungi such as molds and unicellular fungi, broadly defined as yeasts, fulfill essential roles in soil ecosystems as decomposers of organic material and as food sources for other soil dwellers. Fungal species diversity in soil is dependent on a multitude of climatic factors such as rainfall and temperature, as well as soil properties including organic matter, pH, and moisture. Lack of adequate environmental sampling, especially in regions of Asia, Africa, South America, and Central America, hinders the characterization of soil fungal communities and the discovery of novel species. 
We characterized soil fungal communities in nine countries across six continents using ~4,000 soil samples and a protocol developed in the laboratory for the isolation of yeasts and molds. This protocol begins with separate selective enrichment for yeasts and the medically relevant mold Aspergillus fumigatus, in liquid media while inhibiting bacterial growth. Resulting colonies are then transferred to solid media and further processed to obtain pure cultures, followed by downstream genetic characterization. Yeast species identity is established via sequencing of their internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region of the nuclear ribosomal RNA gene cluster, while global population structure of A. fumigatus is explored via microsatellite marker analysis. 
The protocol was successfully applied to isolate and characterize soil yeast and A. fumigatus populations in Cameroon, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Iceland, Peru, New Zealand, and Saudi Arabia. These findings revealed much-needed insights on global patterns in soil yeast diversity, as well as global population structure and antifungal resistance profiles of A. fumigatus. This paper presents the method of isolating both yeasts and A. fumigatus from international soil samples.

Yeast isolation from soil 
The above yeast isolation protocol was implemented to culture yeasts from soil samples originating from 53 locations in nine countries9,12. In total, 1,473 yeast strains were isolated from 3,826 soil samples. Given the different climatic conditions of the nine originating countries, the best incubation temperature for each country was determined based on its mean annual temperature (Table 1). Given...

Watch this Scientific Journal Video about Isolation of Culturable Yeasts and Molds from Soils to Investigate Fungal Population Structure at JoVE.com

Isolation of Culturable Yeasts and Molds from Soils to Investigate Fungal Population Structure

This protocol is an effective, speedy method of culturing yeasts and the mold Aspergillus fumigatus from large sets of soil samples in as little as 7 days. The methods can be easily modified to accommodate a range of incubation media and temperatures as needed for experiments.

Soil is host to an incredible amount of microbial life, with each gram containing up to billions of bacterial, archaeal, and fungal cells. Multicellular ...

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Biology

Extraction of High Molecular Weight Genomic DNA from Soils and Sediments

The soil microbiome is a vast and relatively unexplored reservoir of genomic diversity and metabolic innovation that is intimately associated with ...

Isolation and Purification of Kinesin from Drosophila Embryos

Isolation and Purification of Kinesin from Drosophila Embryos

Motor proteins move cargos along microtubules, and transport them to specific sub-cellular locations. Because altered transport is suggested to underlie a ...

Isolation of Immune Cells from Primary Tumors

Tumors create a unique immunosuppressive microenvironment (tumor microenvironment, TME) whereby leukocytes are recruited into the tumor by various ...

Isolation of Small Noncoding RNAs from Human Serum

The analysis of RNA and its expression is a common feature in many laboratories. Of significance is the emergence of small RNAs like microRNAs, which are ...

Isolation of Myofibroblasts from Mouse and Human Esophagus

Murine and human esophageal myofibroblasts are generated via enzymatic digestion. Neonate (8-12 day old) murine esophagus is harvested, minced, washed, ...

Analysis of Autophagy in Penicillium chrysogenum by Using Starvation Pads in Combination With Fluorescence Microscopy

Analysis of Autophagy in Penicillium chrysogenum by Using Starvation Pads in Combination With Fluorescence Microscopy

The study of cellular quality control systems has emerged as a highly dynamic and relevant field of contemporary research. It has become clear that cells ...

Maintenance of a Drosophila melanogaster Population Cage

Maintenance of a Drosophila melanogaster Population Cage

Large quantities of DNA, RNA, proteins and other cellular components are often required for biochemistry and molecular biology experiments. The short life ...

Removal of Exogenous Materials from the Outer Portion of Frozen Cores to Investigate the Ancient Biological Communities Harbored Inside

The cryosphere offers access to preserved organisms that persisted under past environmental conditions. In fact, these frozen materials could reflect ...

Isolation and Characterization of Microvesicles from Peripheral Blood

The release of extracellular vesicles (EVs) including small endosomal-derived exosomes (Exos, diameter &#60; 100 nm) and large plasma membrane-derived ...

Techniques to Induce and Quantify Cellular Senescence

In response to cellular stress or damage, proliferating cells can induce a specific program that initiates a state of long-term cell-cycle arrest, termed ...