A travelling-wave strategy for plant-fungal trade.

ABSTRACT: For nearly 450 million years, mycorrhizal fungi have constructed networks to collect and trade nutrient resources with plant roots^1,2. Owing to their dependence on host-derived carbon, these fungi face conflicting trade-offs in building networks that balance construction costs against geographical coverage and long-distance resource transport to and from roots³. How they navigate these design challenges is unclear⁴. Here, to monitor the construction of living trade networks, we built a custom-designed robot for high-throughput time-lapse imaging that could track over 500,000 fungal nodes simultaneously. We then measured around 100,000 cytoplasmic flow trajectories inside the networks. We found that mycorrhizal fungi build networks as self-regulating travell

SUBMITTER: Oyarte Galvez L 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11882455 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature