title: Diversity and Distribution of Phenol Oxidase Producing Fungi from Soda Lake and Description ofCurvularia lonarensissp. nov.
abstract: Soda lake is hyper alkaline and saline habitat located in closed craters with high evaporation rate. In current study fungal diversity from water and sediment samples of a soda lake (Lonar lake) located in Buldhana district of Maharashtra, India was investigated using extensive culturomics approach and mimicking the natural conditions of Lonar lake in culture media. A total of 104 diverse isolates of extremophilic fungi were recovered from this study and phylogenetically characterized by internal transcribed spacer (ITS) region sequencing. In addition, due to important role of phenol oxidase, and peroxidase in degradation of toxic phenol, lignin, etc., all isolated pure cultures were also screened for extracellular phenol oxidase and peroxidase production potential. Diversity analysis indicated that different groups of extremophilic fungi are present in the water and sediment samples of Lonar lake. A total of 38 species of fungi belonging to 18-different genera were recovered. Out of 104 isolates 32 showed ≤97% sequences similarity, which were morphologically different and could be potential novel isolates of extremophilic fungi. However, out of 104 isolates only 14 showed the extracellular phenol oxidase production potentials at alkaline pH.Curvulariasp. strain MEF018 showed highest phenol oxidase production at alkaline condition and had low sequence similarity with previously characterized species (96% withCurvularia pseudorobusta). Taxonomic characterization (morphological and physiological) and multi locus sequence analysis (MLSA) using combined alignment of ITS-LSU-gpdof strain MEF018 showed that it is a novel species of the genusCurvulariaand hence proposed asCurvularia lonarensissp. nov.
authors.affiliation: Microbial Culture Collection, National Centre for Cell Science Pune, India.
authors.forename: Rahul
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Sharma
authors.affiliation: Microbial Culture Collection, National Centre for Cell Science Pune, India.
authors.forename: Om
authors.initials: O
authors.lastname: Prakash
authors.affiliation: Microbial Culture Collection, National Centre for Cell Science Pune, India.
authors.forename: Mahesh S
authors.initials: MS
authors.lastname: Sonawane
authors.affiliation: Microbial Culture Collection, National Centre for Cell Science Pune, India.
authors.forename: Yogesh
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Nimonkar
authors.affiliation: Microbial Culture Collection, National Centre for Cell SciencePune, India; Institute of Bioinformatics and Biotechnology, Savitribai Phule Pune UniversityPune, India.
authors.forename: Priyanka B
authors.initials: PB
authors.lastname: Golellu
authors.affiliation: Microbial Culture Collection, National Centre for Cell Science Pune, India.
authors.forename: Rohit
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Sharma
keywords: Curvularia; extremophilic fungi; fungal diversity; lonar lake; phenol oxidase; soda lake