Is That a Tree Inside a Plant Cell? It’s a Fungus! – Getting to the Root of Plant-Fungi Interactions

About 90% of plants have partners that enrich their life – fungal partners, specifically, and nutritional enrichment that the plants use for growth, reproduction, and photosynthesis. How do these relationships form and develop, and what do they look like?

Tune in to explore:

How long fungal spores can survive in soil, waiting to germinate in the presence of the right plant
How plants sense that a particular fungus will have a beneficial effect on them
Whether fungi have microbiomes and associations with bacteria and viruses
How fungi transfer nutrients from the soil to the plants they’re associated with
Katie Field is a professor in plant-fungi interactions at the University of Sheffield in the UK. She discusses all this and more in today’s episode — press play for the full conversation.

Visit https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/biosciences/people/academic-staff/katie-j-field to learn more about Field’s research.