
The endohyphal microbiome is known to include microalgae, mycoviruses, bacteria, cyanobacteria and fungi. Image published in Microbiome and used via Creative Commons license.
Scientists in the Genomics and Bioanalytics Group (B-GEN) published a review article based on their work in BioMed Central journal, Microbiome. The paper, “The endohyphal microbiome: current progress and challenges for scaling down integrative multi-omics microbiome research,” explores the discovery that fungi, which reside in most environments including on and within human and other animal (and plant) hosts, actually have entire communities of other microorganisms living inside them.
Fungi are abundant in the planet’s myriad ecosystems, but to date they have been studied far less frequently or thoroughly than bacteria and viruses. As a result, this concept of “microbiomes within microbiomes” is even more difficult to investigate because of the lack of baseline understanding of fungi as well as a lack of tools, techniques and standardization for investigating intracellular microbiomes. The authors discuss the challenges associated with endohyphal (within fungi) microbiome research including sample extraction, sample preparation, multi-omic data generation, and multi-omic data analysis and integration of these data, and how advancing this area of research could benefit and provide greater insights into the overall studies of all microbiomes. This review of the current status of the field provides a baseline for this growing area of interest and a roadmap for future explorations of this microscopic world.
Published with the paper is a video abstract developed by Microbiome; the video highlights research techniques and the challenges associated with studying fungal microbiomes.
Reference
“The endohyphal microbiome: current progress and challenges for scaling down integrative multi-omic microbiome research,” Microbiome, 11 (2023); DOI: 10.1186/s40168-023-01634-7. Authors: Julia M. Kelliher, Aaron J. Robinson, Reid Longley, Leah Y. D. Johnson, Buck T. Hanson, Demosthenes P. Morales and Patrick S. G. Chain (Los Alamos National Laboratory); Guillaume Cailleau and Pilar Junier (University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland) and Gregory Bonito (Michigan State University).
Funding and mission
This research was supported by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Biological and Environmental Research program and Biological System Science Division. The work supports the Global Security mission area and the Complex Natural and Engineered Systems and Science of Signatures capability pillars.
Technical contact: Julia M. Kelliher (B-GEN)