Effects of Dust Storms on Endopytic Fungal Diversity of Persian Oak via Dust Deposition

Fungal endophytes are living within all plant without causing any symptoms and they can play different roles from mutualistic and anti-herbivore to pathogenic. This group of fungi are hyper divers and many abiotic and biotic factors can affect their diversity. The aim of this study is to investigate the effects of dust storms -thorough dust deposition- on fungal endophytic diversity of Persian Oak (Quercus brantii L.); which is one of the most important species in Zagros forests of Iran. Leaves and branch samples were collected from 5 natural Persian Oak forests in May, Jun and July 2015. After surface sterilization, subsamples were incubated on PDA at 25˚C under dark condition. We also incubated subsamples from deposited dust on the leaf samples. The amount of dust deposition was measured for further investigation. Fugal isolates were identified by morphological and molecular methods. Fungal isolation success, richness, Shannon and Simpson diversity were calculated. We used model based approaches to investigate the effect of dust deposition on fungal isolation and diversity. 76 OTU were identified from 697 fungal isolates mostly from Ascomycetes. Our results indicate that deposited dust alone had only limited effects on fungal isolation and diversity. However, the dust always had strongly differential effects on the fungal isolation and diversity from leaf, branch and deposited dust samples. This results highlights the ecological importance of dust storms and their negative effects on Zagros Oak forests.

Keywords:

Dust deposition , Quercus brantii L. , richness , shannon diversity , simpson diversity , Zagros forest