“I remember clearing out plant root systems and seeing these mycorrhizal fungi actually penetrate into the plant cell and make these beautiful structures inside that look like mini trees, with a single trunk and many tubes as branches – from there, I was hooked,” recalls evolutionary biologist Toby Kiers of her first forays into the world of mycorrhizal fungi while working in Panama in the late 1990s.

“The conventional wisdom was that these were pathogenic fungi. It was so dramatic that they were actually penetrating the cell – they looked like a parasite,” she says.

Scientific thinking has ...

 

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