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Question: “Many gardeners consider fungus to be bad for their gardens. What would you say to convince them that symbiotic gardening techniques using fungus are actually quite beneficial to their garden?”
Within the fossil record, it is estimated that the symbiotic relationship between plants and fungi goes back more than 450 million years ago! It is theorized that through this connection, stress benefits such as drought tolerance were conferred, allowing for the adaptation and movement of plants from an aquatic arena onto dry land.
To further our understandings of symbiosis, a worldwide sampling study was conducted in the 1970’s, showing that all plants in natural ecosystems have symbiotic relationships with various microbes such as fungi. While there are many different types of fungi that interact with plants, the dominant interactions are positive. If you look in natural ecosystems, fungi causing disease is the exception, not the rule. Our focus is on a special group of fungi that live entirely within the plants, called endophytes, and have the ability to confer positive benefits to their plant hosts.
We at Micrologicals have taken a simple approach. Our focus was to search and identify beneficial plant-fungal relationships occurring in natural ecosystems, a relationship that Mother Nature has taken centuries to develop. These fungal endophytes establish a symbiotic relationship to a large number of plants and confer stress tolerances such as exposure to high and low temperature extremes, high salinity, and drought stress. In addition, as an added bonus, these the plants are often larger, more robust, and result in higher yields.