Digging deeper : in search of the mechanisms of carbon and nitrogen exchange in ectomycorrhizal symbioses

Symbiosis with ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi is an advantageous partnership for trees in nutrient-limited environments. Ectomycorrhizal fungi colonize the roots of their hosts and improve their access to nutrients, usually nitrogen (N) and, in exchange, trees deliver a significant portion of their photosynthetic carbon (C) to the fungi. This nutrient exchange affects key soil processes and nutrient cycling, as well as plant health, and is therefore central to forest ecosystem functioning. Due to their ecological importance, there is a need to more accurately understand ECM fungal mediated C and N movement within forest ecosystems such that we can better model and predict their role in soil processes both now and under future climate scenarios. There are a number of hurdles that we must overcome, however, before this is achievable such as understanding how the evolutionary history of ECM fungi and their inter- and intra- species variability affect their function. Further, there is currently no generally accepted universal mechanism that appears to govern the flux of nutrients between fungal and plant partners. Here, we consider the current state of knowledge on N acquisition and transport by ECM fungi and how C and N exchange may be related or affected by environmental conditions such as N availability. We emphasize the role that modern genomic analysis, molecular biology techniques and more comprehensive and standardized experimental designs may have in bringing cohesion to the numerous ecological studies in this area and assist us in better understanding this important symbiosis. These approaches will help to build unified models of nutrient exchange and develop diagnostic tools to study these fungi at various scales and environments

Species-level identity of Pisolithus influences soil phosphorus availability for host plants and is moderated by nitrogen status, but not CO2

Trees are dependent on the activity of soil microorganisms, including mutualistic ectomycorrhizal (ECM) fungi and soil-dwelling bacteria, for access to phosphorus (P). While P is a key limiting nutrient in temperate and other forest ecosystems, our understanding of the contributions of ECM fungi to plant P nutrition and cycling are unclear. Further complicating our understanding of these processes are the combined effects of fungal species and future climate scenarios and soil nutrient availability. In this study we characterised how the ECM fungi Pisolithus albus and Pisolithus microcarpus influenced the amount of plant-available P in soils and plant P content of Eucalyptus grandis. We explored how these fungi influence P cycling by studying their relative P-solubilising and P-mineralising abilities and examining their impact on P cycling gene abundance in the soil bacterial community. These were investigated under different levels of nitrogen addition and atmospheric CO2 to understand how these processes may be impacted by future anthropogenic and climactic change. While inoculation with either P. albus or P. microcarpus resulted in an increase in plant-available P in soil, the amount of plant-available P mobilised was species-specific. This observation was supported by differences in the in vitro P-mobilising abilities of the two fungi. P. albus and P. microcarpus also favoured bacterial communities characterised by a greater abundance of glucose dehydrogenase gene copies for inorganic P solubilisation, complementing the strengths of the ECM fungi in organic P mineralisation and suggesting a distinction in the roles of ECM fungi and bacteria in P cycling. Furthermore, both nitrogen and CO2 levels impacted these P cycling outcomes, often in a species-specific manner. Our findings expand the current understanding of P cycling between forest trees, ECM fungi and soil bacteria, and have important implications for estimations of future anthropogenic impacts on forest ecosystems