Mycorrhizal science
The fungi attached to almost every root on the planet — what they trade, what they build, and what a grower can do to keep them.
Notes
A mycorrhizal association is the normal condition of a plant root, not an extra, and the fungal partner is doing a large share of the phosphorus and water acquisition the plant is credited with.
The research here runs from the evolutionary question — why a fungus should trade fairly at all, and the finding that it allocates phosphorus preferentially to roots supplying more carbon — through to the field question of whether inoculating a farm with them does anything, which for a long time had an embarrassing answer. Recent large-scale trials have improved it: inoculation works on some fields and not others, and soil biology measured beforehand can predict which.
One caution belongs on this page. Glomalin, the substance long credited with gluing soil aggregates together, was reclassified in 2025: the assayed antigen is a polysaccharide rather than the glycoprotein it was described as. The binding effect on aggregates is not in question. The two records that touch it say so.