ArticleISME communications2026
Improved characterisation of coral-associated fungal communities using host DNA depletion and a novel ITS primer.
Article in ISME communications, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Not yet cited in PubMed.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
0 citing papers in PubMed.
No citing paper in PubMed yet.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Fungi are increasingly recognised as integral components of the coral holobiont, with predicted roles in nitrogen cycling, nutrient acquisition and promoting stress tolerance. However, characterising coral-associated fungal communities using metabarcoding remains challenging due to extensive co-amplification of host DNA, often leading to low fungal read recovery and an underestimation of diversity. Here, we developed and validated a robust fungal metabarcoding protocol that consistently improved fungal reads across coral species for comprehensive diversity analyses. We addressed host co-amplification through two approaches: (i) host depletion with the Zymo HostZERO Microbial DNA kit and (ii) a newly designed forward primer, ITS3-CoralF, with mismatches to coral DNA to reduce their amplification when paired with the ITS4 reverse primer. We assessed the extraction kit and primer biases and performance across reef sediment samples, and the tissue and skeletal compartments of three species of corals,
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.