Epibiotic fungal communities of three Tomicus spp. infesting pines in southwestern China conditioned strongly clearly by hosts and locations

In this study, we employed Illumina MiSeq PE300 platform to process 45 samples pooled from 1260 beetle individuals, which were collected from five locations at both branch and trunk infectious periods across Yunnan Province. Much greater species richness was detected using high throughput sequencing of amplified internal transcribed spacer 1 (ITS1) ribosomal DNA (rDNA) libraries than previously documented with culturing dependence methods. A total of 1,326,579 reads were generated; the 97% sequence similarity cutoff produced 6 phylum, 29 class, 76 order, 142 family, 271 genus, 416 species and 948 clusters representing OTUs with at least two reads were recognized. 641, 604 and 261 OTUs were confined to T. yunnanensis, T. minor and T. brevipilosus, respectively. The fungal communities associated to T. yunnanensis and T. minor were remarkably more diverse than that to T. brevipilosus, and the former two structures, associated to T. yunnanensis and T. minor, were similar to each other but distinct to the third one. Principal Coordinate Analysis suggested that epibiotic fungal community structures of the three Tomicus spp. conditioned strongly by hosts and locations but weakly by infected periods and beetle species.