Truffle-Inhabiting Fungi

The fruiting bodies of truffles are a microhabitat for the growth of bacteria, yeasts, fungi, and viruses, which all together represent its "microbiome". In this review, the mycological component of filamentous fungi and yeasts is examined, and a checklist of these fungi, defined here as truffle-inhabiting fungi (TIF), is provided. The role of these fungi and their effects on the truffle biology (e.g., production of volatile organic compounds and effects on mycorrhizal synthesis) and ecology are examined. The problem of methodology for their detection is also discussed. The traditional technique of isolation in culture makes it possible to highlight a very small percentage of the biodiversity of TIF, since the qPCR has allowed detection of the simultaneous presence of several species of TIF within the gleba. The approach with mass sequencing methods, apart from some tests with DGGE, has not for the moment been used since this concerns obtaining sequences of fungi inside a fungus (truffle) whose copies of DNA are represented at least one million times more compared to those of TIF.