Ülle Saks, John Davison, Maarja Öpik, Martti Vasar, Mari Moora and Martin Zobel published a paper in Botany where they analyzed arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal (AMF) communities in plant root samples from a natural forest ecosystem – a primeval forest at Järvselja, Estonia. All together they identified seventy-six AMF sequence groups (virtual taxa, VT) from plant roots. Taken together with seven further VT recorded in an earlier investigation of soil AMF communities at the site (Davison et al., 2012), this represents the highest number of AMF reported from a single ecosystem to date. The six study plant species hosted similar AMF communities. However, AMF community composition in plant roots was significantly different from that in soil and considerably more VT were retrieved from roots than from soil. AMF VT identified from plant roots as a whole and from individual plant species were frequently phylogenetically clustered compared random subsets of the local (from Järvselja forest) and global taxon pools, suggesting that nonrandom assembly processes, notably habitat filtering, may have shaped fungal assemblages. By contrast, the phylogenetic dispersion of AMF communities in soil did not differ from random subsets of the local or global taxon pools. Read more.