Combined short- and long-read metabarcoding of the soil fungi Archaeorhizomycetes

Archaeorhizomycetes is a class of globally widespread soil-dwelling fungi, originally proposed to be associated with plant roots, but their ecology and nutritional mode are not clearly defined. To increase the knowledge about Archaeorhizomycetes' ecology and biogeography, we investigate how they are distributed along major environmental gradients, as well as different soil compartments. We used two approaches: (1)long-read sequencing of amplicons covering parts of the 18S, the ITS region and parts of 28S (approx. 2500 bp) amplified with group-specific primers, and sequenced on PacBio Sequel II and (2) short-read sequencing of the V4 region in 18S with general eukaryotic primers using Illumina paired-end sequencing.