Underground Explorers

The number of fungal species in Madagascar is unknown. Ralaiveloarisoa (2022) estimated that there might be as many as 84,000 – 140,000 species in Madagascar while less than 1000 species (less than 2%) have been described. Many of these species are already under threat due to slash and burn agriculture and might disappear without knowing them. Thus, metabarcoding of the fungal community would be imperative to increase the knowledge on Malagasy fungi more rapidly than is possible with the traditional methods before their vanish. The aim is to produce DNA barcodes of the whole fungal community within a sample using high-throughput DNA sequencing technology and to understand the distribution and the ecological roles of fungi quicker. The results will allow us to compare the fungal diversity from the humid forests in the center and eastern Madagascar to those present in the dry forest in the South-Western. The data produced during this project will increase the number of sequences present in the public repositories so that they also can be used to evaluate the conservation status of Malagasy species.