Sweet herbal scents of spring waft through the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center as Elena Leander digs into a research plot, seeking to understand the unsung heroes of Texas’s iconic annual blooms.

New research publishing in the journal Nature on February 26, 2025 uses advanced robotics to track the hyper-efficient supply chains formed between plants and mycorrhizal fungi as they trade carbon ...

Mycorrhizal fungi live in symbiosis with plants, providing them with nutrients necessary to thrive and potentially playing a key part in preserving threatened species. Although research into ...

The understudied mycorrhizal fungi are vital to ecosystems and may prove critical to the survival of fragile deserts stressed by climate change. Though invisible on the surface of the desert, ...

Scientists made the first detailed global maps of mycorrhizal fungal networks by analyzing DNA from 25,000 soil samples worldwide, showing where these fungi that partner with most plants are most ...

The crowning glory of the Gardenia brighamii is its pearly flower. Nicole Hynson Nicole Hynson normally gets roped in to help when all else fails. The conservation biologist from the University of ...

In 1997, at age 19, Toby Kiers talked her way into the Smithsonian's renowned tropical research institute on Barro Colorado, an island in the middle of the Panama Canal. The scientists studied the ...

In the soils of most ecosystems around the world, mycorrhizal fungal communities form intimate relationships with the roots of the plants above them, exchanging nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen ...

Emily Servante is collaborating on a project with Tilda, funded by the Ebro Foundation. It’s an exciting time to be a microbiologist working in rice research. A global push towards the cultivation of ...