After drying, each sample was finely ground in a mortar, sieved, homogenized and stored at −20°C until DNA extraction was performed. Soil DNA extraction A DNA extraction procedure was specifically developed

for all the four types of soil analysed in this study. Three replicates (5 g each) were prepared for each soil sample, re-suspended in 6–7 ml of CTAB lysis buffer (2% CTAB, 2% Polyvinylpyrrolidon, VX-809 cost 2 M NaCl, 20 mM EDTA, 100 mM Tris–HCl, pH and processed according the detailed protocol described in Additional file 2. Brown crude DNA solutions (about 3 ml in volume) from each reaction were obtained following this extraction phase and 1 ml aliquots were then purified using the Nucleospin Plant II kit (Macherey-Nagel, Düren, Germany) following the manufacturer’s instructions with slight modifications (see Additional file 2). Total DNAs were finally

eluted in 65 μl of elution buffer (5 mM Tris/HCl, pH 8.5). The amount of DNA in each extract was quantified using a NanoDrop ND-1000 Spectrophotometer (Thermo Scientific). The quality of the total DNAs was evaluated with optical density (OD) 260/280 nm and 260/230 nm ratios. Extractions with OD ratios less than 1.4 and DNA quantity less than 25 ng μl–1 were repeated. In addition soil DNA extracts were PCR-amplified with primer pair ITS1-ITS4 [39] to confirm the absence of DNA polymerase inhibitors. Extracts with positive ITS1-ITS4 amplification products (from 500 bp to 1000 bp) were considered suitable for this website quantitative Sulfite dehydrogenase PCR (qPCR) assays. Purified DNAs were stored at −80°C until processed. Primer and probe selection ITS1-5.8 S-ITS2 rDNA sequences of T. magnatum and other truffle

species were retrieved from GenBank database (http://​www.​ncbi.​nlm.​nih.​gov/​; date of accession: June, 2008) and aligned with Multalign [40] to identify species-specific domains for primer and probe selection. Oligonucleotide design was carried out with Primer3 software (http://​frodo.​wi.​mit.​edu/​primer3/​) [41] with the following parameters: amplicon size 90–110, primer size 18–22 bp (opt. 20 bp), melting temperature 58-62°C (opt. 60°C), GC content 40-60% (opt. 50%), Max Self Complementarity = 5. Secondary structures and dimer formation were verified using Oligo Analyzer 1.0.3 software (Freeware, Teemu Kuulasmaa, Finland) and specificity was firstly evaluated in silico using BLASTN algorithm (http://​blast.​ncbi.​nlm.​nih.​gov/​Blast.​cgi). A primer pair and the respective probe was selected for both the ITS1 and the ITS2 region (Table 2) and their specificity was then confirmed with qualitative PCR against genomic DNA of different mycorrhizal, saprobic and pathogenic fungi (Table 3). The specificity of the oligonucleotides selected as probes was tested in PCR reactions using their opposite primers (TmgITS1rev with TmgITS1prob and TmgITS2for with TmgITS2prob).