Metabarcoding fungal community responses to

Miklos Balant (Frankfurt): The ecology of complex fungal communities is not well understood. It is difficult to evaluate, for instance, whether fungal communities can adapt to novel climatic conditions within short timeframes. Our goals are to understand the effects of environmental perturbations on fungal community composition and species interactions, and the influence of community change on ecosystem functioning. We characterize fungal communities in experimental systems by high-throughput sequencing of taxonomically informative DNA fragments (metabarcoding). The effects of warming on leaf-associated fungi depends on the genetic composition of the hosts, demonstrating the interaction of environmental and host genetic factors during the assembly of fungal microbiomes.