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IN THE SOIL, where plant roots meet fungal hyphae, there are trading desks of a kind that came into existence over 200 million years ago – long before people could engage in similar activities . These meeting places are the exchanges where the plants provide mushrooms with nutritive molecules, such as sugars and fats, that they make by photosynthesis, in exchange for raw materials such as nitrates and phosphates, as mushrooms. are able to collect in the vicinity.
This is well established. Botanists have long wondered, however, how the details change when resources become uneven, and therefore scarce in some places and abundant to others. A study has just been published in Current biology Toby Kiers, from the Free University of Amsterdam, suggests that, like cunning traders who know how to make money, mushrooms exploit the scarcity of resources by raising their prices. They require more plant nutrients in exchange for their valuable mineral products.
This preservability has long been suspected. But to prove it, it is to follow the raw materials as and when they are collected and distributed. This turned out to be tricky. Dr. Kiers, however, thought he could do it using structures called quantum dots.
A quantum dot is a matter of a few nanometers in diameter. It is made of a semiconductor material capable of fluorescence when it is struck by ultraviolet rays. Different kinds of fluorescent dots appear in different colors. Dr. Kiers hypothesized that if she and her team would associate quantum dots with phosphate particles, they might be able to track these particles as they were collected by fungi and passed on to them. plants. Matthew Whiteside, a member of her team, developed the technique, tested it and found that she was right. After sowing a petri dish containing fungal hyphae and carrot roots with labeled phosphates, Dr. Whiteside discovered that he could, after sufficient time, locate the labeled phosphates inside the hyphae and roots by projecting ultraviolet light.
Dr. Kiers then arranged some plots of the "Garden" of petri dishes in which mushrooms and carrots were becoming rich in phosphates and, for some, being poor. It has also made sure that phosphates in the rich areas are marked with fluorescent dots that turn blue when they are bombarded with ultraviolet rays and that those in poor areas emit red highlights. By monitoring the collection and trade of phosphates of carrot mushrooms, she found that mushrooms transported them enthusiastically on the hyphal network from areas of abundance to areas of scarcity.
In addition, although she was unable to directly measure the price that carrots paid for their phosphates, she managed to do so indirectly. She found that hyphae growing in resource-poor plots would weigh more weight per unit of phosphate transferred to neighboring roots than those in abundant colonies. According to her, this clearly shows that the mushrooms of the scarcity zones mark the price of their products.
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