A Plant-Fungi Partnership at The Origin of Terrestrial Vegetation
Published:25 May2021 Source:CNRS
450 million years ago, the first plants left aquatic life. Researchers from the CNRS and the Université de Toulouse III -- Paul Sabatier, in collaboration with INRAE, have succeeded in demonstrating that this colonisation of land by plants was made possible by a partnership between plants and fungi. Validating this 40-year-old hypothesis allows us to understand a stage that was crucial to the development of life on Earth. The study is published in Science on 21 May 2021.
About 450 million years ago, the first plants left the water to live on land. To do this, they had to adapt to the aridity of the land. In the 1980s, the study of fossils led to the hypothesis that a plant-fungus alliance may have been at the origin of plant vegetation. It has just been confirmed by an international research team1 led by French scientists2.