Culturing the uncultured marine fungi in the omics age: Opportunities and challenges

Abstract

Fungi are ubiquitous in all kinds of ecosystems with key ecological roles, while less than 10% of them have been described, of which, only about 1.2% are from marine habitats. Although the advance of next-generation sequencing has unquestionably improved our understanding of marine fungi, living cultures of marine fungi are important for studying the cell biology, ecological roles and evolution of microorganisms. In recent years, a number of efficient cultivation strategies, technologies, and devices have been newly developed, most of which were designed for prokaryotes and have been poorly applied to marine fungi. In this review, we give a brief discussion on the factors that may affect the isolation and cultivation of novel microorganisms, and review the omics-based innovative methods for the culturomics or targeted isolation. At last, we discuss the limitations of these approaches and their application potential on isolation and cultivation of marine fungi.