Mycorrhizal Fungi and Plants

Dear Colleagues,

Mycorrhizal fungi are a heterogeneous group of diverse fungal taxa, associated with the roots of over 90% of all plant species. In the last ten years, molecular and genetic tools, the development of high-throughput sequencing technologies, as well as the advances in bioinformatics have allowed improving knowledge on the biology, ecology, and biodiversity of mycorrhizal associations. The contribution of projects dedicated to the sequencing of several mycorrhizal fungal genomes has helped to reveal how evolution has played a crucial role in fashioning fungal genomes to suit their own specialization, highlighting the differences in the symbiotic relationship between the host plant and the fungus in several mycorrhizal interactions. A further important step should be the correlation of findings by -omics approaches with phenotyping data, with the aim to identify the favorable traits associated with several mycorrhizal interactions. Several mycorrhizal fungi can also differently influence different soil processes. Moreover, mycorrhizal fungi are forming multitrophic interactions with micro and macro-organisms (i.e., insects, bacteria) that could also modify their phenotypes. Improving knowledge on all these aspects could be an important point for the optimization in the application of these fungi in sustainable agro-forestry programs.

Prof. Dr. Raffaella Maria Balestrini
Prof. Dr. Pierre-Emmanuel Courty
Guest Editors

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