Out of the water! What is Tetracladium doing on land?

Tetracladium is a decomposer of organic material in freshwater streams, however in recent years it was found to be abundant in soil and in association with plant roots. The group has been found in plant roots all over the world from all climates and vegetation types.  

Research at the University of Warwick School of Life Sciences has found them to have a positive relationship with oilseed rape crop yield in a landscape analysis of the plant microbiome. Little is known about the lifestyle and the interaction of these fungi within plant roots or in terrestrial environments in general.

Anna Lazar with colleagues at Warwick School of Life sciences and Earlham Institute, Norwich have used traditional culturing and plant growth techniques to better understand the functional interactions of the group with their host, however Anna would like to broaden and extend this research approach by using comparative genomic techniques. Using strains isolated from roots of crop plants Anna will assemble the genomes of multiple terrestrial Tetracladium strains that behave differently based on a range of enzymic and nutritional assays. Anna will compare the genomes of these strains to other fungal species which have pathogenic, saprotrophic and mutualistic lifestyles and also the genomes of Tetracladium strains which have been isolated from freshwater. In this way the work will unravel the molecular toolbox which adapts the strains to a terrestrial endophytic lifestyle, including the way they obtain nutrition and interact with their host plant. The new understanding could open up possibilities to use Tetracladium within sustainable agricultural systems - either by managing existing Tetracladium populations in soil or through inoculation approaches.