Fine‐scale distribution of pine ectomycorrhizas and their extramatrical mycelium

Abstract

Summary• In order to clarify the functional role of individual ectomycorrhizal (EcM) fungal species in the field, we need to relate their abundance and distribution as mycorrhizas to their abundance and distribution as extramatrical mycelium (EMM).• We divided each of four 20 cm × 20 cm × 2 cm slices of pine forest soil into 100 cubes of 2 cm × 2 cm. For each cube, ectomycorrhizas were identified and the presence of EMM of the EcM fungi recorded as ectomycorrhizas was determined by terminal restriction fragment length polymorphism (T-RFLP) analysis of ITS rDNA.• Ectomycorrhizas and EMM of seven EcM species were mapped. Spatial segregation of mycorrhizas and EMM was evident and some species produced their EMM in different soil layers from their mycorrhizas.• The spatial relationship between mycorrhizas and their EMM generally conformed to their reported exploration types, but EMM of smooth types (e.g. Lactarius rufus ) was more frequent than expected. Different EcM fungi foraged at different spatial scales.

Rock-eating mycorrhizas: their role in plant nutrition and biogeochemical cycles

“…The co-occurrence of EcM fungi in the O and E horizon may seem surprising in view of the large differences in soil chemistry between both horizons, but may be a consequence of the proliferation in the E horizon of hyphae that are attached to root tips in the O horizon. Genney et al (2006) also made the observation that the extraradical mycelium showed less clearly vertical niche differentiation than the ectomycorrhizas and exhibited a larger depth range. They argued that such patterns relate to the ability of the EcM fungus to utilise a wide range of substrates.…”

Succession of plant and soil microbial communities with restoration of abandoned land in the Loess Plateau, China

“…The T-RFLP approach has been applied in the analysis of bacterial (McMahon et al 2011;Tom-Petersen et al 2003;Blackwood and Paul 2003;Hartmann et al 2005), archaeal (Moeseneder et al 2001; Leybo et al 2006), and fungal (Bennett et al 2008;Genney et al 2006) rRNA genes, as well as functional genes such as ammoniaoxidizing (Fan et al 2011), nitrogen-denitrifying (Wolsing and Priemé 2004), and dissimilatory (bi)sulfite reductase genes (Liu et al 2009), among others. The profiles of T-FRLP were analyzed using different methods, such as principal component analysis for the interpretation of the significance of the effects of complex T-RFLP patterns (Blackwood and Paul 2003;Wang et al 2004;Park et al 2006;, redundancy analysis for the analysis of T-RFLP data exhibiting a linear response to the environmental variables (Fan et al 2011), canonical correspondence analysis (CCA) for the validation of the unimodal relationship between microbial communities and environmental factors (Chang et al 2010), and multidimensional scaling (MDS) (Wolsing and Priemé 2004) and Nonmetric MDS (Bennett et al 2008;Lee et al 2010;McMahon et al 2011) methods for estimating the similarities among samples.…”

Temporal Changes in the Ectomycorrhizal Community in Two Soil Horizons of a Temperate Oak Forest

“…Differences in ECM community structure on different scales are well documented: on the ecosystem scale (postdisturbance or postplanting successions) and along forest dynamics (4, 28, 56, 65), on the seasonal scale (6,8,20,33,54), and along spatial dimensions (vertical scale [13,14,24,49] and horizontal scale [36,58]). In a microsite or on a forest strand scale, species are distributed neither uniformly nor randomly but rather are aggregated in patches or distributed along gradients (9,12,19,24,44). The spatial heterogeneity of communities is important in terms of succession, adaptation, maintenance of species diversity, interspecific competition, and community stability (38).…”