fromwww.npr.org
3 weeks agoHow plants and fungi trade resources without a brain
The fungi would penetrate the roots of nearby plants, so some scientists suspected they were parasites. But over the following years, as Kiers earned her PhD and became an evolutionary biologist, she and other researchers showed that mycorrhizae were exchanging resources: They gave the plants phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for sugars and fats that plants made from carbon in the air.
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