The importance of culture-based techniques in the genomic era for assessing the taxonomy and diversity of soil fungi

Abstract

Fungi are a diverse and highly abundant group of organisms found in soils worldwide.Understanding fungi is essential as they are key drivers of below-ground ecosystem functions.Taxonomy is a fundamental discipline, acting as the initial step toward biodiversity, ecology, and biotechnology studies.Both culture-dependent and -independent methods are employed in the taxonomic investigations of soil-dwelling taxa.High-throughput sequencing (HTS) is a genomicbased method widely applied in global studies that has revealed numerous unculturable soil taxa.However, this method is limited by its inability to link physical specimens to species identification.Culturing methods result in specimens that can be used to obtain genetic sequences and morphological data in applied studies.Thus, combining both methods is an important trend in taxonomic studies.This review discusses how culturing is important for soil fungal discovery and describes the main culturing methods.It also briefly addresses the role of HTS in taxonomy and its drawbacks, and the potential to combine both culture-dependent and -independent methods to gain better insights into soil fungi.