The relative importance of dispersal and niche restrictions remains a controversial topic in community ecology, especially for microorganisms that are often assumed to be ubiquitous. We investigated the impact of these factors for the community assembly of the root‐symbiont arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) by sampling roots from geothermal and nonthermal grasslands in Yellowstone National Park (YNP), followed by sequencing a...

Glomus intraradices , an arbuscular mycorrhizal fungus (AMF), is frequently found in a surprisingly wide range of ecosystems all over the world. It is used as model organism for AMF and its genome is being sequenced. Despite the ecological importance of AMF, little has been known about their population structure, because no adequate molecular markers have been available. In the present study we analyse for the first time the i...

Communities of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) in five agricultural field sites of different management intensities were studied. Variable regions of the ribosomal RNA genes were used to detect and identify AMF directly within colonized roots. Roots from a continuous maize monoculture showed low AMF diversity, in agreement with previous reports on molecular diversity of AMF in agricultural soils. In contrast, a substantiall...

We determined the size of genets of late‐stage ectomycorrhizal fungi in field sites in coastal Northern California. Basidiocarps were collected, mapped and subjected to genetic fingerprinting using amplified fragment length polymorphisms (AFLPs). The minimum size estimates for the largest genets of Amanita francheti , Lactarius xanthogalactus and Russula cremoricolor were 1.5, 9.3 and 1.1 m 2 , respectively. The molecular mark...