The invasion success of alien plant species depends, amongst other things, on their functional traits [4] and the susceptibility of ecosystems. There is now increasing interest in including biotic interactions particularly mutualistic associations [5], into frameworks assessing alien plant invasions, as they help bridge the invisibility and invasiveness features. The great majority of terrestri...

Rillig, M. C. 2004. Arbuscular mycorrhizae, glomalin, and soil aggregation. Can. J. Soil Sci. 84: 355–363. Arbuscular mycorrhizae are important factors of soil quality through their effects on host plant physiology, soil ecological interactions, and their contributions to maintaining soil structure. The symbiosis is faced with numerous challenges in agroecosystems; in order to inform sustainabl...

Nutrient availability is an important factor in crop production, and regular addition of chemical fertilizers is the most common practice to improve yield in agrosystems for intensive crop production. The use of some groups of microorganisms that have specific activity providing nutrients to plants is a good alternative, and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) enhance plant nutrition by providin...

UNLABELLED We investigated communities of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) in the roots and the rhizosphere soil of Brachypodium retusum in six different natural soils under field conditions. We explored phylogenetic patterns of AMF composition using indicator species analyses to find AMF associated with a given habitat (root versus rhizosphere) or soil type. We tested whether the AMF charact...

The root microbiome is composed of an incredibly diverse microbial community that provides services to the plant. A major question in rhizosphere research is how species in root microbiome communities interact with each other and their host. In the nutrient mutualism between host plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), competition often leads to certain species dominating host colonizati...

Arbuscular Mycorrhizal (AM) fungi hold considerable potential for use as inoculant and nowadays much attention is focused on mass production of AM fungal inoculum, since this is of paramount importance in improving plant production in agriculture and horticulture. However, effectivity of these fungi on crop growth relies on their production practices, typically the substrate selected for its ma...

Legumes can establish intracellular interactions with symbiotic microbes to enhance their fitness, including the interaction with arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi. AM fungi colonize root epidermal cells to gain access to the root cortex, and this requires the recognition by the host plant of fungus-made mycorrhizal factors. Genetic dissection has revealed the symbiosis signaling pathway that a...

The nature of variation in morphological characters in spores of arbuscular endomycorrhizal fungi (Order Glomales, Class Zygomycetes) has received little attention, despite the importance of these characters in modern taxonomy of the order. We tested the hypothesis that genetic variation exists in spore size and color (presumably important taxonomic characters) within a single isolate of the gl...

Mycorrhizal fungi constitute a key functional group of soil biota that greatly contribute to productivity and sustainability of terrestrial ecosystems. These are ubiquitous components of most of the ecosystems throughout the world and are considered key ecological factors in governing the cycles of major plant nutrients and in sustaining the vegetation cover (van der Hejden eta!. 1998; Requena ...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Differences in competitive ability between the sexes of dioecious plants are expected as a result of allocation trade-offs associated with sex-differential reproductive costs. However, the available data on competitive ability in dioecious plants are scarce and contradictory. In this study sexual competition was evaluated using the dioecious plant Antennaria dioica in a comm...