a billion-year history

The press releases on which I filter-feed on a daily basis are always a mixed bag. They include the good, the bad and the ugly along with a few hilarious ones, and if a major genomics study involved ten separate organisations, I may well receive ten separate press releases about the same paper.

An example of a good story that caught my attention immediately, with the headline alone, arrived in February from Virginia Tech. The winning headline was:

Researchers investigate a billion years of coexistence between plants and fungi

A billion years is a very long time, even in evolutionary biology, and if you look closer it means that the cooperation between the lineages of plants and fungi is older than the spread of either lineage on dry land. So did they help each other conquer land? Did their cooperation which is still happening in many shapes and sizes today make life on the continents possible? These questions are discussed in my feature, which is out in today's issue of Current Biology:


The success story of plants and fungi

Current Biology Volume 29, issue 6, pages R183-R185, March 18, 2019

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Root samples labelled with a fluorescent dye to determine the fungal colonisation rates and mycorrhizal structures. (Photo: © Ming Wang, MPI for Chemical Ecology.