A mycorrhizal fungi tunning tool for adaptation to harsh environment

Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) are symbiotic fungi that improve plant productivity and plant survival in stress environments.

AMF inocula are produced commercially and used to enhance plant growth and soil quality in agriculture and environmental restoration.

A system is needed allowing AMF inocula to be tailor-made, providing AMF that are adapted or tolerant to given stressful environments. At present, this does not exist. It is also unknown how AMF can adapt to a given environment. The most advanced AMF mass production technique is an in vitro cultivation system.

However, this system has not been developed into a tool allowing the production of AMF with a tolerance to a given environment.

This project provides a novel way to build an in-vitro AMF adaptation TOOL that will adapt fungi to stress environments and that can then be mass produced for soil remediation. Increasing anthropogenic activities are the leading causes of soil damage. Soil is a precious resource and its renewal after contamination is extremely laborious and slow.

In particular, many soils are heavy metal (HM) polluted.

We will, therefore, adapt AMF to the most common heavy metal contaminants; namely, cadmium (Cd), lead (Pb), copper (Cu) and Zinc (Zn).

This project focuses on adapting the AMF species Rhizophagus irregularis to HM contamination and understand the adaptation mechanisms at molecular levels.

The results will not only allow us to fill the scientific gaps regarding AMF adaptation to HM environments, and whether it is associated with genetic and epigenetic change, but also provide a possibility to obtain HM tolerant AMF that will be of great environmental and commercial value. Furthermore, this project will immediately allow the possibility of scaling-up to mass production.

Moreover, the AMF adaptation TOOL will allow further expansion and implementation of this novel technology to other environments for future applications in agriculture and soil remediation.