Mycorrhizal fungi and insects are important components of most ecosystems that are likely to interact with one another indirectly through a common host plant. In this paper, we review the literature examining the effects of insects on mycorrhizal fungi and the effects of mycorrhizal fungi on insects and show that both groups of organisms can indirectly and, occasionally directly, influence each...

Ectomycorrhizal fungi occur in remarkably species-rich assemblages. One of the prevailing hypotheses to explain this diversity is niche differentiation; by occupying distinct ecological niches within a site, multiple fungal species are able to co-occur (Bruns, 1995). In this issue of New Phytologist (pp. 000–000), Ishida and colleagues make a significant contribution to our understanding of nic...

The vibration of fungal cultures was evaluated to determine its potential effect on the dispersal of airborne fungal microorganisms suspected of being pathogens. An artificial vibration system, which simulates the actual environmental vibration of fungal structures, was designed and constructed for this purpose. Experiments featured the use of low-frequency vibrations similar to those induced b...

A general method for compressing the modulation time-bandwidth product of analog signals is introduced. As one of its applications, this physics-based signal grooming, performed in the analog domain, allows a conventional digitizer to sample and digitize the analog signal with variable resolution. The net result is that frequency components that were beyond the digitizer bandwidth can now be ca...

INTRODUCTION Trichosporon species are basidiomycetous yeastlike anamorphic organisms that are widely distributed in nature and found predominantly in tropical and temperate areas. In humans, this fungal species is occasionally part of the commensal flora of skin and mucosa, and can be responsible for superficial skin and hair infections (white piedra) or, more rarely, invasive infections in imm...

In this paper we discuss an oblique incidence and observation electronic speckle-pattern interferometer, in which we use an anamorphic prism in front of the object. A collimated beam traveling through the prism is partly reflected at the base of the prism. The reflected light is the reference beam and the transmitted light illuminates the diffuse object, thereby generating the object beam. In t...

The Wigner distribution of rotationally symmetric partially coherent light is considered, and the constraints for its moments are derived. Although all odd-order moments vanish, these constraints lead to a drastic reduction in the number of parameters that we need to describe all even-order moments: whereas in general we have (N + 1)(N + 2)(N + 3)/6 different moments of order N, this number red...

Esca disease of grapevine is gaining increasing importance in Central European wine-growing countries. Several fungi, all of which are wood-inhabiting, were found to be associated with the disease. The taxa thought to act as main causal agents are the basidiomycete, Fomitiporia mediterranea, and, less frequently, the deuteromycetes, Phaeomoniella chlamydospora and Phaeoacremonium aleophilum. In...

Adhesive conidia of the nematophagous fungus, Drechmeria coniospora (Drechsler) W. Gams and Jansson (Moniliales: Deuteromycetes), would occasionally attach but never penetrate the infective stages of insect parasitic Neoaplectana carpocapsae, N. glaseri, N. bibionis, N. intermedia, and Heterorhabditis helfothidis (Rhabditida). However, adult and pre-infective stages of Neoaplectana spp. became ...

The generally positive relationship between biodiversity of groups of directly or indirectly interacting organisms is one of the most important ecological concepts (Gaston, 2000 Nature, 405, 220-227; Scherber C, Eisenhauer N, Weisser WW et al., 2010 Nature, 468, 553-556). In a recent issue of Molecular Ecology, Gao C, Shi N-N, Liu Y-X et al. (2013: 22, 3403-3414) reported that the richness of p...