Group‐specific environmental sequencing reveals high levels of ecological heterogeneity across the microsporidian radiation

The description of diversity is a key imperative in current biological studies and has been revolutionised by the molecular era that allows easy access to microbial diversity not visible to the naked eye. Broadly targeted SSU rRNA gene amplicon studies of diverse environmental habitats continue to reveal new microbial eukaryotic diversity. However, some eukaryotic lineages, particularly parasites, have divergent SSU sequences, and are therefore undersampled or excluded by the methodologies used for SSU studies. One such group is the Microsporidia, which have particularly divergent SSU sequences and are rarely detected in even large-scale amplicon studies. This is a serious omission as microsporidia are diverse and important parasites of humans and other animals of socio-economic importance. Whilst estimates of other microbial diversity are expanding, our knowledge of true microsporidian diversity has remained largely static. In this work, we have combined high throughput sequencing, broad environmental sampling and microsporidian-specific primers to broaden our understanding of the evolutionary diversity of the Microsporidia. Mapping our new sequences onto a tree of known microsporidian diversity we uncover new diversity across all areas of the microsporidian tree and uncover clades dominated by novel sequences, with no close described relatives.