Diversity of mycelial fungi in natural and human-affected Antarctic soils

Environmental disturbance is an unpreventable consequence of human impact after exploration and research station management in Antarctica. Environmental pollution may directly influence Antarctic mycobiota. However, information about the effect of anthropogenic factors on microscopic fungi at extremely low temperatures is insufficient. This work compared the abundance and the species diversity of mycelial fungi from soils of six Russian research Antarctic stations—Bellingshausen, Progress-2, Druzhnaya-4, Molodezhnaya, Novolazarevskaya and Oasis−affected by various anthropogenic impacts (operation of tracked and wheeled vehicles, storage and use of petroleum products and petroleum leakage sites) with that from their background analogues. New data were obtained on the taxonomic diversity of mycelial fungi from Antarctic soils with different anthropogenic loads. Cultural, morphological and physiological studies of 142 isolated strains of mycelial fungi were supplemented by molecular–biological research into sterile mycelium strains and those with vague morphological characters. This contributed not only to the verification but also to a significant increase in the number of taxa of mycelial fungi isolated from low-temperature ecotopes. Leotiomycetes and Dothideomycetes were found to be the most dominant classes in the studied samples. It was shown that several ecological groups of micromycetes could be isolated among the mycobiota of the investigated habitats, the abundance and species composition of which changed differently under the influence of anthropogenic factors. The current results highlight that microbiota changes in human-affected soils can serve as an indicator of the state of low-temperature ecotopes in general.