The fungi that reside in the human lungs represent an understudied, but medically relevant comm-unity. From the few studies published on the lung mycobiome, we find that there are fungi in both the healthy and diseased respiratory tract, that these fungi vary widely between individuals, and that there is a trend toward lower fungal diversity among individuals with disease. This review discusses the few studies of the lung mycobiome and details the challenges that accompany lung mycobiome studies. These challenges include sample collection and processing, sequence amplification and processing, and a history of multiple names for species. Some challenges may never be solved, but others can be solved with more data and additional studies of the lung mycobiome.
Keywords: fungi; lung; mycobiome; next-generation sequencing; respiratory tract.