Mycorrhizal Fungi as Mediators of Soil Organic Matter Dynamics

By Serita Frey. Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution and Systematics, 2019

440 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Inhabiting the interface between plant roots and soil, mycorrhizal fungi play a unique but underappreciated role in soil organic matter (SOM) dynamics. Their hyphae provide an efficient mechanism for distributing plant carbon throughout the soil, facilitating its deposition into soil pores and onto mineral surfaces, where it can be protected from microbial attack. Mycorrhizal exudates and dead tissues contribute to the microbial necromass pool now known to play a dominant role in SOM formation and stabilization. While mycorrhizal fungi lack the genetic capacity to act as saprotrophs, they use several strategies to access nutrients locked in SOM and thereby promote its decay, including direct enzymatic breakdown, oxidation via Fenton chemistry, and stimulation of heterotrophic microorganisms through carbon provision to the rhizosphere. An additional mechanism, competition with free-living saprotrophs, potentially suppresses SOM decomposition, leading to its accumulation. How these various nutrient acquisition strategies differentially influence SOM formation, stabilization, and loss is an area of critical research need.

Subfields: Insect Science, Plant Science, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9734960aefde292b20d3233e3410f40a4eed1ff9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Plant Science

1. K. Smalla
2. D. Vetterlein
3. E. Oburger
4. Andrea Carminati
5. G. Bienert
6. Andrea Schnepf

In Soil Science

1. I. Kögel‐Knabner
2. D. Vetterlein
3. E. Oburger
4. Andrea Carminati
5. Andrea Schnepf

Citations in the corpus

• Rhizosphere Spatiotemporal Organization–A Key to Rhizosphere Functions (2018, background): “It is to be expected that rhizodeposition has a strong effect, not only on microbial C processing, but also on the stabilization of organic C in soils and hence carbon storage (Frey, 2019; Sokol et al., 2019).”