Introduction Many people that read this chapter may be aware of mammals, birds, and maybe even plant species that are common at Pt. Reyes, and may have witnessed or have been aware of the ways that these organisms responded to the Mt. Vision fire of 1995. Few will be familiar with fungal species at Pt. Reyes, and even fewer may have noticed their response to the fire. This is unfortunate, becau...

Many people that read this chapter may be aware of mammals, birds, and maybe even plant species that are common at Point Reyes, and may have witnessed or have been aware of the ways that these organisms responded to the Vision fi re of 1995. Few will be familiar with fungal species at Point Reyes, and even fewer may have noticed their response to the fi re. This is un for tu nate, be cause fung...

Although arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi are ubiquitous symbionts of plants, the mutualism has rarely been tested in nature. In experiments designed to explore the ecological relevance of associations between different fungal and plant species in a natural environment, plant species were infected with different species of fungi and grown in separate trials in the laboratory and a North Caroli...

Arbuscular mycorrhiza (AM) symbioses contribute to global carbon cycles as plant hosts divert up to 20% of photosynthate to the obligate biotrophic fungi. Previous studies suggested carbohydrates as the only form of carbon transferred to the fungi. However, de novo fatty acid (FA) synthesis has not been observed in AM fungi in absence of the plant. In a forward genetic approach, we identified t...

Fungal acquisition of resources is difficult to assess in the field. To determine whether fungi received carbon from recent plant photosynthate, litter or soil-derived organic (C:N bonded) nitrogen, we examined differences in δ13C among bulk tissue, structural carbon, and protein extracts of sporocarps of three fungal types: saprotrophic fungi, fungi with hydrophobic ectomycorrhizae, or fungi w...

There is consensus that plant species richness enhances plant productivity within natural grasslands, but the underlying drivers remain debated. Recently, differential accumulation of soil-borne fungal pathogens across the plant diversity gradient has been proposed as a cause of this pattern. However, the below-ground environment has generally been treated as a 'black box' in biodiversity exper...

Diverse clades of mycorrhizal and endophytic fungi are potentially involved in competitive or facilitative interactions within host-plant roots. We investigated the potential consequences of these ecological interactions on the assembly process of root-associated fungi by examining the co-occurrence of pairs of fungi in host-plant individuals. Based on massively-parallel pyrosequencing, we anal...

Fungi and plants are rich sources of thousands of secondary metabolites. The genetically coded possibilities for secondary metabolite production, the stimuli of the production, and the special phytotoxins basically determine the microscopic fungi-host plant interactions and the pathogenic lifestyle of fungi. The review introduces plant secondary metabolites usually with antifungal effect as wel...

Fungi and oomycetes are the causal agents of many of the most serious diseases of plants. Here we report a detailed comparative analysis of the genome sequences of thirty-six species of fungi and oomycetes, including seven plant pathogenic species, that aims to explore the common genetic features associated with plant disease-causing species. The predicted translational products of each genome ...

Mutualistic interactions between species are receiving increased attention from ecologists, although research lags far behind analogous work on competition or predator-prey interactions. Most research has focused on rather showy mutualisms such as pollination or fruit dispersal and has suggested that mutualisms are more important in tropical communities than in temperate communities (67). Plant...