TY  - JOUR
A1  - Maciá-Vicente, Jose G.
A1  - Bai, Bing
A1  - Qi, Run
A1  - Ploch, Sebastian
A1  - Breider, Florian
A1  - Thines, Marco
T1  - Nutrient availability does not affect community assembly in root-associated fungi but determines fungal effects on plant growth
T2  - mSystems
N2  - Nonmycorrhizal root-colonizing fungi are key determinants of plant growth, driving processes ranging from pathogenesis to stress alleviation. Evidence suggests that they might also facilitate host access to soil nutrients in a mycorrhiza-like manner, but the extent of their direct contribution to plant nutrition is unknown. To study how widespread such capacity is across root-colonizing fungi, we surveyed soils in nutrient-limiting habitats using plant baits to look for fungal community changes in response to nutrient conditions. We established a fungal culture collection and used Arabidopsis thaliana inoculation bioassays to assess the ability of fungi to facilitate host’s growth in the presence of organic nutrients unavailable to plants. Plant baits captured a representation of fungal communities extant in natural habitats and showed that nutrient limitation has little influence on community assembly. Arabidopsis thaliana inoculated with 31 phylogenetically diverse fungi exhibited a consistent fungus-driven growth promotion when supplied with organic nutrients compared to untreated plants. However, direct phosphorus measurement and RNA-seq data did not support enhanced nutrient uptake but rather that growth effects may result from changes in the plant’s immune response to colonization. The widespread and consistent host responses to fungal colonization suggest that distinct, locally adapted nonmycorrhizal fungi affect plant performance across habitats.
IMPORTANCE: Recent studies have shown that root-associated fungi that do not engage in classical mycorrhizal associations can facilitate the hosts’ access to nutrients in a mycorrhiza-like manner. However, the generality of this capacity remains to be tested. Root-associated fungi are frequently deemed major determinants of plant diversity and performance, but in the vast majority of cases their ecological roles in nature remain unknown. Assessing how these plant symbionts affect plant productivity, diversity, and fitness is important to understanding how plant communities function. Recent years have seen important advances in the understanding of the main drivers of the diversity and structure of plant microbiomes, but a major challenge is still linking community properties with function. This study contributes to the understanding of the cryptic function of root-associated fungi by testing their ability to participate in a specific process: nutrient acquisition by plants.
KW  - Arabidopsis thaliana
KW  - fungi
KW  - grasslands
KW  - growth promotion
KW  - heathlands
KW  - roots
Y1  - 2022
UR  - http://publikationen.ub.uni-frankfurt.de/frontdoor/index/index/docId/62895
UR  - https://nbn-resolving.org/urn:nbn:de:hebis:30:3-628956
SN  - 2379-5077
N1  - This study was supported by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft) under grant MA7171/1-1, and by the Centre for Translational Biodiversity Genomics, funded by the LOEWE initiative of the government of Hessen.
N1  - Data availability:
The MiSeq and RNA-seq data generated in this study have been deposited in the NCBI Sequence Read Archive under BioProject numbers PRJNA640064 and PRJNA706587. The ITS and LSU sequences obtained from fungal cultures are deposited in NCBI GenBank (see Table S3 at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.14222264 for accession numbers). Representative fungal strains isolated in this study have been deposited in the CBS Culture Collection (Westerdijk Fungal Biodiversity Institute, Utrecht, The Netherlands).
VL  - 7
IS  - 3
SP  - 1
EP  - 14
PB  - American Society for Microbiology
CY  - Washington, DC
ER  -