Functional traits in mycorrhizal ecology

Today microbial communities are identified from sequencing environmental DNA. This provides researchers with a long lists of DNA sequences and potential names but what to these microbes actually do? To answer this we need make functional test to at least to some of the microbes of interest. This also holds true for a fascinating group of microbes, the arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF). AMF live in symbiosis with plants and use their fine meshed fungal mycelia to exchange mineral nutrition with plants. Therefore, I will spend a 5-month research stay at Estación Experimental del Zaidín, Granada, Spain with the aim to test yet uncharacterized species/clades for soil and root mycelial proliferation.