Researchers have demonstrated that unique fungi strengthen the 'immune systems' of wheat and bean plants against aphids. Fungi enter and influence the amount of a plant's own defenses, resulting in ...

Most plants worldwide live in symbiosis with fungi. Often there is an exchange of nutrients from which both partners benefit. In numerous other cases, however, the plants feed unilaterally at the ...

In 1997, at age 19, Toby Kiers talked her way into the Smithsonian's renowned tropical research institute on Barro Colorado, an island in the middle of the Panama Canal. The scientists studied the ...

Just beneath your feet, an ancient and silent alliance endures. This alliance between plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi is one of the oldest biological partnerships on Earth. Going back ...

Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights. I cover the living world, from microbes to ecosystems. In a study published at the end of 2018, scientists used vast amounts of ...

Almost all crop plants form associations with a particular type of fungi - called arbuscular mycorrhiza fungi - in the soil, which greatly expand their root surface area. This mutually beneficial ...

When the researchers ground up the samples and analyzed them, they found an unexpected type of fungi: mycorrhizal, which is ...

The number of plant species that extract organic nutrients from fungi could be much higher than previously assumed. This was discovered by researchers from the University of Bayreuth and the ...

Meg Duff: For Science, Quickly, I’m Meg Duff. As the world heats up, many of the consequences of burning fossil fuels are now painfully obvious. But there’s also this less intuitive consequence: under ...

In soils across the world, fungi trade resources with the plants they colonise in a mutually beneficial relationship. But it turns out the fungi are savvy traders, taking advantage of their partners ...

If you liked this story, share it with other people. The “State of the World’s Plants and Fungi 2020” report, released this week, was born of the collaborative effort of 200 scientists from 42 ...

Scientists have created plants whose cells and tissues 'blush' with beetroot pigments when they are colonized by fungi that help them take up nutrients from the soil. This is the first time this vital ...