COPFUN: Biological and chemical diversity of coprophilous fungi, with special focus on the taxonomy of the Sordariales

• Applicant: Dr. Yasmina Marin Felix
• Subject Area: Evolution and Systematics of Plants and Fungi
• Term: since 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 490821847

The proposed project deals with the exploitation of the functional biodiversity of fungi that inhabit herbivore dung - a highly competitive environment that is very likely to harbor many species that are hitherto unknown to Science. The majority of the fungi dwelling in dung belong to the division Ascomycota and the class Sordariomycetes and many of their species have already been described during the 19th and 20th century. However, in recent time, these fungi have been widely neglected by taxonomists, and they remain to be re-examined according to modern polythetic taxonomic concepts. At the same time, recent work on selected Sordariomycetes, which predominantly belong to the order Sordariales, has revealed them to be rather versatile in terms of secondary metabolite production. The Sordariales have also been in the focus of our recent taxonomic studies that resulted in the re-arrangement of genera and families as inferred from multilocus molecular phylogenies in conjunction with extensive morphological studies. A concurrent evaluation of the type strains for production of secondary metabolites has already resulted in the discovery of several biologically active compounds that also seem to have chemotaxonomic significance. While the latter work was focusing mainly on soil and plant associated species, we intend to expand these activities to dung as a substrate. A special isolation strategy that was already successfully used for isolation of fungi from soil, where it has yielded many rare and previously undescribed fungal species, will be adapted to dung as a substrate for the first time. This technique is based on pre-treatment of the dung samples with heat and chemicals, which kill ubiquitous molds and is suitable to revive dormant spores of slow-growing species at the same time. In parallel, the substrate will be observed microscopically and the rare and interesting fungi will be taken in pure culture directly from the substrates. As judged from own preliminary work, we estimate that we can obtain ca. 60 fungal taxa that constitute either new species or may be suited to serve as epi-or neotypes for taxa that were described decades ago in the envisaged time frame. Also supported by our international, interdisciplinary collaboration network, the following work will be carried out: 1. Multi gene-genealogies and new taxonomic monographs with focus on coprophilous Sordariales and other Sordariomycetes.2. Studies on the secondary metabolism of selected species, with the goal to establish chemotaxonomic correlations and/or to discover new natural products. 3. Establishment of the first phylogenomic study on the Sordariales based on high quality full genome sequences, generated by 3rd generation technologies such as Oxford nanopore (with Illumina polishing) to strengthen the phylogenetic backbone for the order.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants