Psychrophilic fungi are a critical biotic component in cold deserts that serves a central role in nutrient recycling and biogeochemical cycles. Despite their ecological significance, culture-independent studies on psychrophilic mycobiome are limited. In the present study, the fungal diversity patterns across the Drass, an Indian cold desert in the Himalaya, were indexed by targeted amplicon pyrosequencing (ITS). In the Drass dataset, Ascomycota was represented by 92 genera, while 22 genera represented Basidiomycota. The most abundant genus was Conocybe (20.46%). Most of the identified genera were reported in the literature to be prolific extracellular hydrolytic enzyme producers. To identify whether the Drass fungal assemblages share similarities to other cold deserts, these were further compared to Antarctic and Arctic cold deserts. Comparative analysis across the three cold deserts indicated the dominance of Dikarya (Ascomycota and Basidiomycota). The observed alpha diversity, Shannon index as well as Pielou's evenness was highest in the Antarctic followed by Drass and Arctic datasets. The genera Malassezia, Preussia, Pseudogymnoascus, Cadophora, Geopora, Monodictys, Tetracladium, Titaea, Mortierella, and Cladosporium were common to all the cold deserts. Furthermore, Conocybe was represented predominantly in Drass. Interestingly, the genus Conocybe has not been previously reported from any other studies on Antarctic or Arctic biomes. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first fungal metagenome study in Drass soil. Our analysis shows that despite the similarities of low temperature among the cold deserts, a significant differential abundance of fungal communities prevails in the global cold deserts.

中文翻译：

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对喜马拉雅西北部寒冷沙漠真菌组合的宏基因组学见解。

嗜冷真菌是寒冷沙漠中的重要生物成分，在养分循环和生物地球化学循环中起着核心作用。尽管具有生态意义，但对嗜冷菌群的独立于文化的研究是有限的。在本研究中，通过靶向扩增子焦磷酸测序 (ITS) 对印度喜马拉雅寒冷沙漠 Drass 的真菌多样性模式进行了索引。在 Drass 数据集中，子囊菌门由 92 个属代表，而担子菌门由 22 个属代表。最丰富的属是 Conocybe (20.46%)。大多数已鉴定的属在文献中被报道为多产的细胞外水解酶生产者。为了确定 Drass 真菌组合是否与其他寒冷的沙漠有相似之处，我们进一步将它们与南极和北极的寒冷沙漠进行了比较。三个寒冷沙漠的比较分析表明 Dikarya（子囊菌门和担子菌门）占主导地位。观测到的 alpha 多样性、香农指数以及 Pielou 的均匀度在南极最高，其次是 Drass 和北极数据集。Malassezia、Preussia、Pseudogymnoascus、Cadophora、Geopora、Monodictys、Tetracladium、Titaea、Mortierella 和 Cladosporium 在所有寒冷沙漠中都很常见。此外，Conocybe 主要出现在 Drass。有趣的是，之前关于南极或北极生物群落的任何其他研究都没有报道过 Conocybe 属。据我们所知，这是第一次在 Drass 土壤中进行真菌宏基因组研究。我们的分析表明，尽管寒冷沙漠之间的低温相似，