Accounting for local adaptation in ectomycorrhizas: a call to track geographical origin of plants, fungi, and soils in experiments

Rúa, Megan A.; Lamit, Louis J.; Gehring, Catherine A.; Antunes, Pedro M.; Hoeksema, Jason D.; Zabinski, Cathy; Karst, Justine; Burns, Cole; Woods, Michaela J.

doi:10.1007/s00572-017-0811-y

Cited by 12 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…We propose that geography, habitats and methodology should be used more often as covariates in mycorrhizal meta‐studies, as suggested by Rúa et al . ().…”

Section: Problems With the Out Of Context Use Of Mycorrhizal Colonizamentioning

confidence: 97%

Misdiagnosis of mycorrhizas and inappropriate recycling of data can lead to false conclusions

Brundrett

Tedersoo

2018

New Phytologist

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We draw attention to a worrying trend for the uncritical use of 'recycled' mycorrhizal data to compile host species lists that include obvious errors or undertake risky analyses that correlate mycorrhizal colonisation levels with environmental or physiological factors despite inherent limitations in datasets. We are not suggesting that all meta-studies are wrong, only that more care should be taken to resolve what can safely be done with recycled mycorrhizal data in the future. We also recommend that mycorrhizal species lists should be checked against standard references since the majority of EM hosts and NM plant belong to families that are well resolved. However, additional research is required in cases where plant families have multiple root types within genera or occur in habitats where mycorrhizal associations are often suppressed (see Brundrett & Tedersoo, 2018). We hope that the mycorrhizal science community will work together more closely in the future to develop and enforce standards for mycorrhizal diagnosis and to share carefully corrected datasets for realistic meta-studies.

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“…We propose that geography, habitats and methodology should be used more often as covariates in mycorrhizal meta‐studies, as suggested by Rúa et al . ().…”

Section: Problems With the Out Of Context Use Of Mycorrhizal Colonizamentioning

confidence: 97%

Misdiagnosis of mycorrhizas and inappropriate recycling of data can lead to false conclusions

Brundrett

Tedersoo

2018

New Phytologist

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“…A study explicitly incorporating climate, altitude, and soil effects also found that soil fungi mediated the adaptation of Douglas fir seedlings in over half of their treatment combinations (Pickles et al, 2015). However, a recent meta-analysis found no overall effect of host-fungal sympatry on host performance in EM systems, though this conclusion was based on a small number of studies (Rúa et al, 2018).…”

Section: Local Adaptationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Clear evidence of the importance of these adaptive processes has been shown for plants forming arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) symbioses (Rúa et al, 2016a;Johnson et al, 2010), but there have been comparatively few studies exploring local adaptation in ectomycorrhizal (EM) systems. While there is some evidence suggesting the existence of genotype × genotype interactions in ectomycorrhizal hosts (Piculell et al, 2008;Hoeksema & Thompson, 2007;Hoeksema et al, 2012;Pickles et al, 2015); overall, there appears to be little evidence so far for local adaptation in host populations (Rúa et al, 2018).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Heritable genetic variation but no local adaptation in a pine-ectomycorrhizal interaction

et al. 2020

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Local adaptation of plants to mycorrhizal fungi helps determine the outcome of mycorrhizal interactions. However, there is comparatively little work exploring the potential for evolution in interactions with ectomycorrhizal fungi, and fewer studies have explored the heritability of mycorrhizal responsiveness, which is required for local adaptation to occur. We set up a reciprocal inoculation experiment using seedlings and soil from four populations of Scots pine (Pinus sylvestris) from Scotland, measuring seedling response to mycorrhizal inoculation after 4 months. We estimated heritability for the response traits and tested for genotype × environment interactions. While we found that ectomycorrhizal responsiveness was highly heritable, we found no evidence that pine populations were locally adapted to fungal communities. Instead, we found a complex suite of interactions between pine population and soil inoculum. Our results suggest that, while Scots pine has the potential to evolve in response to mycorrhizal fungi, evolution in Scotland has not resulted in local adaptation. Long generation times and potential for rapid shifts in fungal communities in response to environmental change may preclude the opportunity for such adaptation in this species, and selection for other factors such as resistance to fungal pathogens may explain the pattern of interactions found.

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“…And although there are notable developments in identifying, surveying and cataloguing the biogeography of fungi (Glassman et al, ; Peay et al, ; Tedersoo et al, ), these attempts lag behind those for plants. One easy solution to this issue would be for researchers to report the geographical origin of plants, fungi and soils used in experiments to enable subsequent meta‐analysis on this topic (Rúa et al, ). Finally, an important finding revealed by quantile regression is that for tree species with small ranges, their response to EM fungal inoculation poorly accounted for the heterogeneity in outcomes.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Most experiments used fungal mycelia, followed by spores, field soils, and roots to inoculate seedlings. The sources of inoculum were mostly unknown (Rúa et al, ), and the most common growth medium was sand. Most experiments were done in the greenhouse and lasted for approximately 7 months.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Tree species with limited geographical ranges show extreme responses to ectomycorrhizas

Karst

Burns

Cale

et al. 2018

Global Ecol Biogeogr

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Aim At continental scales, abiotic factors such as climate are typically used to explain differences in plant ranges. Although biotic interactions also underlie the biogeography of plants, the importance of plant‐associated microbes is often overlooked when predicting ranges. In particular, symbiotic microbes may influence the distribution of plants that engage in strong interactions with them. We tested whether seedling response to inoculation by ectomycorrhizal fungi explains range size of trees. To examine mechanisms underlying the relationship between range size and response to inoculation, we also examined to what extent sympatry between host and fungi influenced this relationship. Location Global. Time period Contemporary. Major taxa studied Trees and fungi forming ectomycorrhizas. Methods Using a dataset of 1,275 observations from 126 papers, we calculated mean biomass response (effect size) of 59 tree species to fungal inoculation. We extracted host range area from digitized maps of native distributions, and determined whether hosts were naturally sympatric with fungal species used as inoculum by searching herbaria databases with geospatially referenced data. Results Tree species with seedling effect sizes falling above or below the average response tended to have small ranges and those with average responses, large ranges. Moreover, hosts inoculated with fungi whose ranges were allopatric to their own had higher biomass compared to those that were inoculated by sympatric fungi, suggesting that the extent of geographical overlap between trees and symbiotic fungi may attenuate the mutualism. Main conclusions We demonstrate that mycorrhizas may underlie host biogeographical patterns at the continental scale. Our study is novel in the scope of species and scale tested, and points to a possible mechanism underlying this pattern related to the process of mutualism breakdown accruing over time at local geographical scales. For ectomycorrhizal tree species, performance may increase when exposed to fungal partners without a recent shared evolutionary history.

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Accounting for local adaptation in ectomycorrhizas: a call to track geographical origin of plants, fungi, and soils in experiments

Cited by 12 publications

References 66 publications

Misdiagnosis of mycorrhizas and inappropriate recycling of data can lead to false conclusions

Misdiagnosis of mycorrhizas and inappropriate recycling of data can lead to false conclusions

Heritable genetic variation but no local adaptation in a pine-ectomycorrhizal interaction

Tree species with limited geographical ranges show extreme responses to ectomycorrhizas

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