Fungal Traits Important for Soil Aggregation.

Soil structure, the complex arrangement of soil into aggregates and pore spaces, is a key feature of soils and soil biota. Among them, filamentous saprobic fungi have well-documented effects on soil aggregation. However, it is unclear what properties, or traits, determine the overall positive effect of fungi on soil aggregation.

Tradeoffs in hyphal traits determine mycelium architecture in saprobic fungi.

The fungal mycelium represents the essence of the fungal lifestyle, and understanding how a mycelium is constructed is of fundamental importance in fungal biology and ecology. Previous studies have examined initial developmental patterns or focused on a few strains, often mutants of model species, and frequently grown under non-harmonized growth conditions; these factors currently collectively hamper systematic insights into rules of mycelium architecture. To address this, we here use a broader suite of fungi (31 species including members of the Ascomycota, Basidiomycota and Mucoromycota), all isolated from the same soil, and tested for ten architectural traits under standardized laboratory conditions.