| Literature DB >> 28515898 |
Sofia I F Gomes1,2, Vincent S F T Merckx1, Serguei Saavedra3.
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.Entities:
Keywords: mycoheterotrophic interactions; mycorrhizal cheaters; niche overlap; niche width; plant coexistence; plant–belowground interactions
Year: 2017 PMID: 28515898 PMCID: PMC5433980 DOI: 10.1002/ece3.2974
Source DB: PubMed Journal: Ecol Evol ISSN: 2045-7758 Impact factor: 2.912
Figure 1Illustration of possible fungal‐host patterns among mycoheterotrophic plants. On the vertical and horizontal axes, the figure illustrates, respectively, an increase in fungal‐host diversity and fungal‐host overlap among MH plants. The bottom right panel represents a scenario for plants with high chances of competitive exclusion given by their large fungal‐host overlap and their small fungal‐host diversity (using similar functional traits). The top left panel represents a scenario for plants with low chances of co‐occurring in the same space given by their small fungal‐host overlap and their large fungal‐host diversity (using different functional traits), which could be difficult to find in a common place. The diagonal panels then represent the scenarios for plants with a higher chance of coexistence given by their symmetry between fungal‐host overlap and fungal‐host diversity, which could lead to maximize co‐occurrence (exploit available resources) and to minimize competitive exclusion
Figure 2Fungal‐host patterns in single mycoheterotrophic plants. Panel (a) shows the distribution of the total number of fungal hosts associated with each of the 20 observed MH plants. Panel (b) shows the fungal‐host diversity (scaled phylogenetic diversity) associated with each of the 20 observed plants. This shows that most of the observed MH plants have a fungal‐host diversity that falls in the upper half of the potential range. The dashed lines correspond to the mean values in the distributions
Figure 3Fungal‐host diversity increases along with fungal‐host overlap among mycoheterotrophic plants. The figures show the relationship between fungal‐host diversity and fungal‐host overlap for both the six observed communities in the field (panel a) and in the artificially generated groups of plants (of the 20 sampled MH species) (panel b). Both panels show the common positive relationship between fungal‐host diversity (scaled phylogenetic diversity in y‐axis) and fungal‐host overlap (scaled overlap in x‐axis). Fungal‐host diversity and overlap correspond, respectively, to the combined phylogenetic diversity of the hosts associated with the plants in each group normalized by the number of fungal hosts, and the fraction of shared fungal hosts (see Section 2). The solid lines correspond to the linear regression between scaled PD and scaled overlap across all points
Fungal‐host diversity is higher in groups of plants that belong to the same location. The table shows the t‐test results comparing the scaled PD in groups of MH plants (composed by two, three, four, or five species) that belong to the same location and in different locations
| Scaled PD | Mean in same location | Mean in different location |
| 95% CI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Two species | 0.421 | 0.297 | .0012 | 0.05, 0.20 |
| Three species | 0.412 | 0.327 | .0002 | 0.04, 0.13 |
| Four species | 0.479 | 0.394 | .0009 | 0.04, 0.39 |
| Five species | 0.553 | 0.440 | .0023 | 0.05, 0.18 |
Fungal‐host overlap is higher in groups of plants that belong to the same location. The table shows the ‐test results comparing the scaled overlap in groups of MH plants (composed by two, three, four, or five species) that belong to the same location and in different locations
| Scaled overlap | Mean in same location | Mean in different location |
| 95% CI |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Two species | 0.358 | 0.220 | 6.6 e‐6 | 0.07, 0.21 |
| Three species | 0.493 | 0.362 | 3.2 e‐8 | 0.09, 0.17 |
| Four species | 0.512 | 0.404 | 2.1 e‐8 | 0.08, 0.14 |
| Five species | 0.577 | 0.458 | 1.3 e‐5 | 0.08, 0.15 |