All plants studied in natural ecosystems are symbiotic with fungi that either reside entirely (endophytes) or partially (mycorrhizae) within plants. These symbioses appear to adapt to biotic and abiotic stresses and may be responsible for the survival of both plant hosts and fungal symbionts in high stress habitats. Here we describe the role of symbiotic fungi in plant stress tolerance and pres...

Sewage sludge is widely used as an organic soil amendment to improve soil fertility. We investigated the effects of sewage sludge (SS) application on certain biological parameters of Eucalyptus globulus Labill. The plant was either uninoculated or inoculated with saprobe fungi (Coriolopsis rigida and Trichoderma harzianum) or arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi (Glomus deserticola and Gigaspora r...

Almost all land plant species form a symbiosis with mycorrhizal fungi. These soil fungi provide nutrients and other services to plants in return for plant carbohydrates. The recent application of microbial metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and metabolomics to plants and their immediate surroundings confirms the key role of mycorrhizal fungi, rhizosphere bacteria and fungi, and suggests a world...

The aim of phytopathological monitoring is to check the healthiness of plants and observe the changes that occur in their populations. In the vast majority, these types of observations are conducted in agriculture and forestry. An interesting aspect of phytopathological monitoring is the assessment of the origin of the plant species. The research of fungal communities (including pathogens) in p...

A basic tenet of ecology is that negative feedback on abundance plays an important part in the coexistence of species within guilds. Mutualistic interactions generate positive feedbacks on abundance and therefore are not thought to contribute to the maintenance of diversity. Here, I report evidence of negative feedback on plant growth through changes in the composition of their mutualistic fung...

Fungi have adapted to diverse habitats and ecological niches, including the complex plant systems. Success of the pathogenic or symbiotic fungi in colonizing the plant tissue depends on their ability to modulate the host defense signaling [1]. Strategies that impart such abilities in fungi include the use of effector proteins that directly disrupt phytohormone-based defense signaling pathways a...

BACKGROUND The discovery and development of novel plant cell wall degrading enzymes is a key step towards more efficient depolymerization of polysaccharides to fermentable sugars for the production of liquid transportation biofuels and other bioproducts. The industrial fungus Trichoderma reesei is known to be highly cellulolytic and is a major industrial microbial source for commercial cellulas...

Fungal diseases of plants represent one of the most eminent threats to agriculture. Given the food needs of a growing world population and that more and more crops are devoted to fuel production, the necessity to develop crops with better resistance to disease is increasing. To accomplish this, the mechanisms that plant pathogenic fungi use to colonize plants need to be elucidated. As of now, t...

The simultaneous extraction of host plant DNA severely limits investigations of the community structures of plant-associated fungi due to the similar homologies of sequences in primer-annealing positions between fungi and host plants. Although fungal-specific primers have been designed, plant DNA continues to be excessively amplified by PCR, resulting in the underestimation of community structu...

The population ecology of clonal plants depends on the number and distribution of ramets formed during growth. Variation in clonal reproduction has previously been explained by variation in effects of abiotic resource heterogeneity and by plant genotypic variation. Different co-occurring species of the mutualistic arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) have been shown to differentially alter growth...