title: Species accumulation curves and incidence-based species richness estimators to appraise the diversity of cultivable yeasts from beech forest soils.
abstract: BACKGROUND
  Yeast-like fungi inhabit soils throughout all climatic zones in a great abundance. While recent estimations predicted a plethora of prokaryotic taxa in one gram of soil, similar data are lacking for fungi, especially yeasts.
  
  
  RESULTS
  We assessed the diversity of soil yeasts in different forests of central Germany using cultivation-based techniques with subsequent identification based on rDNA sequence data. Based on experiments using various pre-cultivation sample treatment and different cultivation media we obtained the highest number of yeasts by analysing mixed soil samples with a single nutrient-rich medium. Additionally, several species richness estimators were applied to incidence-based data of 165 samples. All of them predicted a similar range of yeast diversity, namely 14 to 16 species. Randomized species richness curves reached saturation in all applied estimators, thus indicating that the majority of species is detected after approximately 30 to 50 samples analysed.
  
  
  CONCLUSIONS
  In this study we demonstrate that robust species identification as well as mathematical approaches are essential to reliably estimate the sampling effort needed to describe soil yeast communities. This approach has great potential for optimisation of cultivation techniques and allows high throughput analysis in the future.
authors.affiliation: Geobotany, Department of Evolution and Biodiversity of Plants, Faculty of Biology and Biotechnology, Ruhr-Universität Bochum, Bochum, Germany. andrey.yurkov@rub.de
authors.forename: Andrey M
authors.initials: AM
authors.lastname: Yurkov
authors.forename: Martin
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Kemler
authors.forename: Dominik
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Begerow
mesh_terms: D000704:Analysis of Variance; D044822:Biodiversity; D004271:DNA, Fungal / Q000737:chemistry / Q000235:genetics; D004275:DNA, Ribosomal / Q000737:chemistry / Q000235:genetics; D029964:Fagus / Q000254:growth & development*; D014644:Genetic Variation; D005858:Germany; D010802:Phylogeny; D011157:Population Dynamics; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D012988:Soil Microbiology; D013045:Species Specificity; D014197:Trees / Q000254:growth & development*; D015003:Yeasts / Q000145:classification / Q000235:genetics / Q000254:growth & development*
chemical_list: D004271:DNA, Fungal; D004275:DNA, Ribosomal