Shoot P concentration (A, B) and content (C, D) with (closed squares) or without (open squares) AM fungi in experiment 2 and 3.

<p>Asterisk indicates significant differences (<i>P</i><0.05) between mycorrhizal treatment and non-mycorrhizal treatment.</p

Shoot and root biomass, seed number, and root/shoot ratio of <i>C. arenarius</i> with or without AM fungi under field conditions and in the pot experiment.

<p>Different lowercase letters in each column indicate significant differences in colonization (<i>P</i><0.05) between mycorrhizal and non-mycorrhizal treatments.</p

PCR primers used in this study.

<p>PCR primers used in this study.</p

Mycorrhizal colonization in the root system of <i>C. arenarius</i> in experiments 2 and 3.

<p>Different lowercase letters in each column indicate significant differences in colonization (<i>P</i><0.05) between mycorrhizal and non-mycorrhizal treatments.</p

Neighbour-joining tree showing representatives of all sequence types identified in this work (in bold), and reference sequences from Genbank (in italics), using <i>Glomus drummondi</i> as the outgroup.

<p>The five topology has been tested by bootstrap analysis with 1000 replicates, and all bootstrap values >70% are shown. All new sequences have been submitted to the GenBank database (Accession nos JN805771–JN805847).</p

Dynamics of mycorrhizal colonization in the root system of <i>C. arenarius</i> from the field at different harvest times in Experiment 1.

<p>Different lowercase letters in each column represent significant difference (<i>P</i><0.05) among different times.</p

Mycorrhizal structures (×400) in roots of

<p><b><i>C. arenarius</i></b><b>.</b> A collected from Gurbantunggut Desert on 12 April 2009 in experiment 1, B from experiment 2, and C from experiment 3.</p