2024-02-20 アリゾナ大学
Betsy Arnold and her team accessed remote areas of the boreal forests of eastern North America by floatplane. A view from the window shows spruce trees growing from a carpet of moss and lichens, and the lake on which the researchers were to land.
Betsy Arnold
◆これらの菌類は内生菌であり、しばしば相互に有益な関係を築いています。マックス・プランク精神医学研究所のBetsy Arnold教授らの研究チームは、これらの菌類がどのようにして異なる微小環境に適応し、将来の気候変動の影響を受けるかを理解するために、10年以上前にカナダ北東部の荒野へと冒険しました。彼らは、様々な菌類の大きな多様性を発見し、それらが地元の条件に高度に特化して適応していることを見出しました。この研究結果は、将来の北極林の健康と地球全体の健康に影響を与えます。
<関連情報>
- https://news.arizona.edu/story/future-fungal-research-finds-fungi-live-healthy-plants-are-sensitive-climate-change
- https://www.cell.com/current-biology/abstract/S0960-9822(24)00100-3
地球最大の陸上バイオームにおけるエンドファイト(内生植物)を規定する環境要因と不可解な生物多様性ホットスポット Environmental drivers and cryptic biodiversity hotspots define endophytes in Earth’s largest terrestrial biome
Jana M. U’Ren,Shuzo Oita,François Lutzoni,…Denis Valle,Valerie Trouet,Elizabeth Arnold
Current Biology Published:February 16, 2024
DOI:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2024.01.063
Highlights
•Endophyte associations with boreal plants and lichens are defined by climate
•Effects of climate on endophyte diversity differ among hosts and fungal lineages
•Endophyte biodiversity hotspots occur at key plant-community transitions
•Climate change threatens symbiotic fungi in Earth’s largest terrestrial biome
Summary
Understanding how symbiotic associations differ across environmental gradients is key to predicting the fate of symbioses as environments change, and it is vital for detecting global reservoirs of symbiont biodiversity in a changing world.1,2,3However, sampling of symbiotic partners at the full-biome scale is difficult and rare. As Earth’s largest terrestrial biome, boreal forests influence carbon dynamics and climate regulation at a planetary scale. Plants and lichens in this biome host the highest known phylogenetic diversity of fungal endophytes, which occur within healthy photosynthetic tissues and can influence hosts’ resilience to stress.4,5We examined how communities of endophytes are structured across the climate gradient of the boreal biome, focusing on the dominant plant and lichen species occurring across the entire south-to-north span of the boreal zone in eastern North America. Although often invoked for understanding the distribution of biodiversity, neither a latitudinal gradient nor mid-domain effect5,6,7can explain variation in endophyte diversity at this trans-biome scale. Instead, analyses considering shifts in forest characteristics, Picea biomass and age, and nutrients in host tissues from 46° to 58° N reveal strong and distinctive signatures of climate in defining endophyte assemblages in each host lineage. Host breadth of endophytes varies with climate factors, and biodiversity hotspots can be identified at plant-community transitions across the boreal zone at a global scale. Placed against a backdrop of global circumboreal sampling,4our study reveals the sensitivity of endophytic fungi, their reservoirs of biodiversity, and their important symbiotic associations, to climate.
