Detection of soil fungal communities in an alpine primary successional habitat: Does pooling of DNA extracts affect investigations?

Our main aim was to understand whether the use of pooled DNA extracts bias the results of investigations in soil fungal communities in an alpine habitat. To avoid bias by DNA extraction methods, we used a commercial DNA extraction kit and consecutively pooled 1-4 DNA extracts from 0.25 g soil, each, before cloning. We expected to detect abundant species in all approaches, and the same diversity in clone libraries from pooled extracts. Soil fungal communities of primary successional sites mainly consist of rare species. Irrespective of pooling, no significant differences of species richness or diversity were detected between clone libraries.