Extensive Fungal Diversity in Plant Roots

Six-year fertilization modifies the biodiversity of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in a temperate steppe in Inner Mongolia

“…The Glomeraceae has been shown to have the ability to colonize new roots via their mycelium or colonized root fragments (Tommerup and Abbott, 1981) and can do so at a higher sporulation rate and intensity than species from Acaulosporaceae and Gigasporaceae (Hart and Reader, 2002). Similar to present study, domination of the AMF communities by Glomus species has also been reported in forest (Husband et al, 2002a,b;Öpik et al, 2003), grassland (Vandenkoornhuyse et al, 2002a;Scheublin et al, 2004;Santos et al, 2006), wetland (Wirsel, 2004) and agricultural (Daniell et al, 2001;Hijri et al, 2006) soils.…”

“…This suggests either a site-dependent response to N, or functional diversity within this species. DL-Glo15, which can be assigned to F. mosseae can also be considered a generalist fungal species since it is very common in various ecosystems, including temperate arable fields (Daniell et al, 2001), tropical forests (Husband et al, 2002a,b), seminatural grasslands (Vandenkoornhuyse et al, 2002a) and wetlands (Wirsel, 2004). However, only three sequences of this species were detected in this study, suggesting that this species was exiguous in the research area.…”

“…It has been reported that spore populations in the soil do not reflect the AMF communities in roots (Clapp et al, 1995), and spore morphological characteristics are highly imprecise as descriptions usually depend on the identifier's experience and therefore needs to be treated with caution. Recently, the application of molecular techniques to the identification of AMF in the field has revealed an unexpectedly high diversity of AMF, with many detected sequences that cannot be related to known taxa (Vandenkoornhuyse et al, 2002a). These findings have challenged the traditional knowledge of a relatively low number of AMF species.…”

“…Furthermore, most studies have focused on AMF diversity either in roots (Helgason et al, 1999;Daniell et al, 2001;Vandenkoornhuyse et al, 2002a) or in soils (Alguacil et al, 2012;Lin et al, 2012), and few studies examined both simultaneously. However, the overlap between the AMF species composition in soil and the functionally active AMF communities within mycorrhizal roots has been shown to be relatively low (Clapp et al, 1995;Hempel et al, 2007).…”

Fungal Assemblages Associated with Roots of Halophytic and Non-halophytic Plant Species Vary Differentially Along a Salinity Gradient

“…The mechanistic processes responsible for the mutual benefits between plant and endophytes are still cryptic [12], partly due to the broad taxonomical and functional diversity of these interactions, but also to the unspecificity of the mutualism. As an example, a single plant may harbor a good diversity of associated microbes [13] playing different roles within the plant tissues, covering the range between mutualism, through commensalism, to eventual pathogenicity. In the meantime, these plant inhabitants may interact with each other in very different manners.…”