Abstract
The vast majority of plants obtain an important proportion of vital resources from soil through mycorrhizal fungi. Generally, this happens in exchange of photosynthetically fixed carbon, but occasionally the interaction is mycoheterotrophic, and plants obtain carbon from mycorrhizal fungi. This process results in an antagonistic interaction between mycoheterotrophic plants and their fungal hosts. Importantly, the fungal‐host diversity available for plants is restricted as mycoheterotrophic interactions often involve narrow lineages of fungal hosts. Unfortunately, little is known whether fungal‐host diversity may be additionally modulated by plant–plant interactions through shared hosts. Yet, this may have important implications for plant competition and coexistence. Here, we use DNA sequencing data to investigate the interaction patterns between mycoheterotrophic plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. We find no phylogenetic signal on the number of fungal hosts nor on the fungal hosts shared among mycoheterotrophic plants. However, we observe a potential trend toward increased phylogenetic diversity of fungal hosts among mycoheterotrophic plants with increasing overlap in their fungal hosts. While these patterns remain for groups of plants regardless of location, we do find higher levels of overlap and diversity among plants from the same location. These findings suggest that species coexistence cannot be fully understood without attention to the two sides of ecological interactions.
Highlights
Mycorrhizal fungi play a crucial role for plant survival (Smith & Read, 2008)
We found that the number of fungal hosts in each of the 20 MH plant species varies from 2 to 42
By dividing the categories of MH plants into one in which all plants belong to the same location and another one in which not all plants belong to the same location, we found that typically the former group displays higher levels of both scaled phylogenetic diversity (PD) and scaled overlap across the different group sizes
Summary
Mycorrhizal fungi play a crucial role for plant survival (Smith & Read, 2008). In mycorrhizal interactions, mycorrhizal fungi facilitate the uptake of essential resources for plant metabolism, such as water and soil minerals (Raven, Evert, & Eichhorn, 1999). Plants do not give back carbon, but instead obtain it from the mycorrhizal fungi as replacement for photosynthesis (Leake, 1994; Merckx, Bidartondo, & Hynson, 2009) This results in an antagonistic interaction between plants and their fungal hosts. Little is known whether fungal-host diversity may be modulated by plant–plant interactions through shared hosts This may have important implications for plant competition and coexistence (Bever et al, 2010). In the case of MH interactions, a given group of plant species can be exploiting either closely or distantly related fungal hosts (see Figure 1) This same group of plants can have either a weak or a strong fungal-host overlap (see Figure 1). We study how the phylogenetic diversity of arbuscular mycorrhizal hosts varies among individual MH plants, and how this diversity is modulated and shared among groups of MH plants
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