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Hiding in a crowd—does diversity facilitate persistence of a low-quality fungal partner in the mycorrhizal symbiosis?

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Abstract

Given that arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi are not consistently beneficial to their host plants, it is difficult to explain the evolutionary persistence of this relationship. We tested the hypothesis that increasing either fungal or host biodiversity allows an AM fungus to persist on a host where it shows little benefit. We found that growing such a fungus (an isolate of Glomus custos associating with Plantago laceolata) in combination with certain fungi improved its success as measured by mtLSU DNA abundance. Increasing plant species richness facilitated the spread of this fungus as measured by spore density and fungal colonization; the role of host species richness was not as clear when looking at measures of root abundance. These results indicate that diversity in the AM symbiosis, both plant and fungal, can promote the persistence of low-quality fungi. By existing within a complex mycelial network fungal strains that show little growth benefit to their hosts have a better chance of persisting on that same host. This has the potential to promote selection for heterogeneous AM fungal communities on a small spatial scale.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Monika Gorzelak for invaluable help with the references, and Erik Verbruggen for critical reading the manuscript. We also thank NSERC (Discovery grant to MMH), NSF (IOS 1051397 to HB) and NWO (Vidi and Meervoud grant to ETK) for financial support.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Biology Department, University of British Columbia Okanagan, Kelowna, BC, V1V 1V7, Canada

    Miranda M. Hart, Jennifer Forsythe & Brian Oshowski

  2. Department of Biology and Microbiology, South Dakota State University, Brookings, SD, 57007, USA

    Heike Bücking

  3. Institute of Microbiology, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Vídeňská 1083, Praha 4 – Krč, Czech Republic

    Jan Jansa

  4. Institute of Ecological Science, Vrije Universiteit, De Boelelaan 1085, Amsterdam, 1081 HV, The Netherlands

    E. Toby Kiers

Authors
  1. Miranda M. Hart
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  2. Jennifer Forsythe
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  3. Brian Oshowski
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  4. Heike Bücking
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  5. Jan Jansa
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  6. E. Toby Kiers
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Miranda M. Hart.

Additional information

MMH and ETK designed the experiment, BO collected data, JJ designed the molecular probes, JF and MMH performed the molecular and statistical analyses, MMH wrote the first draft and HB, JJ and ETK contributed substantially to revisions.

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Hart, M.M., Forsythe, J., Oshowski, B. et al. Hiding in a crowd—does diversity facilitate persistence of a low-quality fungal partner in the mycorrhizal symbiosis?. Symbiosis 59, 47–56 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13199-012-0197-8

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