Soil microbes play key roles in ecosystems, yet the impact of their diversity on plant communities is still poorly understood. Here we demonstrate that the diversity of belowground plant-associated soil fungi promotes plant productivity and plant coexistence. Using additive partitioning of biodiversity effects developed in plant biodiversity studies, we demonstrate that this positive relationsh...

The spatial scale on which microbial communities respond to plant invasions may provide important clues as to the nature of potential invader-microbe interactions. Lespedeza cuneata (Dum. Cours.) G. Don is an invasive legume that may benefit from associations with mycorrhizal fungi; however, it has also been suggested that the plant is allelopathic and may alter the soil chemistry of invaded si...

Tropical forests are being rapidly altered by logging, and cleared for agriculture. Understanding the effects of these land use changes on soil fungi, which play vital roles in the soil ecosystem functioning and services, is a major conservation frontier. Using 454-pyrosequencing of the ITS1 region of extracted soil DNA, we compared communities of soil fungi between unlogged, once-logged, and t...

With improvements in molecular techniques, identification of taxa in mycorrhizal ecology has expanded from fruitbodies to mycorrhizal roots to extraradical hyphae (Anderson & Cairney, 2004). These molecular techniques are, in general, equally applicable to saprotrophic fungi, although this important functional group has received relatively little focus in community studies (Allmer et al ., 2006...

Recent studies have shown that continuous cropping in soybean causes substantial changes to the microbial community in rhizosphere soil. In this study, we investigated the effects of continuous cropping for various time periods on the diversity of rhizosphere soil arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi in various soybean cultivars at the branching stage. The soybean cultivars Heinong 37 (an intermed...

Recent studies have detected phylogenetic signals in pathogen-host networks for both soil-borne and leaf-infecting fungi, suggesting that pathogenic fungi may track or coevolve with their preferred hosts. However, a phylogenetically concordant relationship between multiple hosts and multiple fungi in has rarely been investigated. Using next-generation high-throughput DNA sequencing techniques, ...

Fungi are important components of every ecosystem. In nature, they play a significant role as decomposers, decomposing organic matter into simple compounds available for plants. They curious group organisms that attracts more and interest not only among mycologists phytopathologists, but also geneticists, biochemists physiologists. Metabolic products arboreal fungi show multidirectional action,...

Wooded meadows are seminatural plant communities that support high diversity of various taxa. Due to changes in land use, wooded meadows have severely declined during the last century. The dominant trees in wooded meadows acquire mineral nutrients via ectomycorrhizal fungi. Using anatomotyping and sequencing of root tips, interpolation and extrapolation methods, we studied the diversity and com...

In general, plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi exchange photosynthetically fixed carbon for soil nutrients, but occasionally nonphotosynthetic plants obtain carbon from AM fungi. The interactions of these mycoheterotrophic plants with AM fungi are suggested to be more specialized than those of green plants, although direct comparisons are lacking. We investigated the mycorrhizal inter...

Identifying a soil core microbiome is crucial to appreciate the established microbial consortium, which is not usually subjected to change and, hence, possibly resistant/resilient to disturbances and a varying soil context. Fungi are a major part of soil biodiversity, yet the mechanisms driving their large-scale ecological ranges and distribution are poorly understood. The degree of fungal comm...