articleNatureFeb 26, 2025HYBRID OA

A travelling-wave strategy for plant–fungal trade

Institute for Atomic and Molecular Physics · Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam · +13 more institutions

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Abstract

Abstract For nearly 450 million years, mycorrhizal fungi have constructed networks to collect and trade nutrient resources with plant roots 1,2 . Owing to their dependence on host-derived carbon, these fungi face conflicting trade-offs in building networks that balance construction costs against geographical coverage and long-distance resource transport to and from roots 3 . How they navigate these design challenges is unclear 4 . Here, to monitor the construction of living trade networks, we built a custom-designed robot for high-throughput time-lapse imaging that could track over 500,000 fungal nodes simultaneously. We then measured around 100,000 cytoplasmic flow trajectories inside the networks. We found…

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