TY - JOUR T1 - Testing for co-adaptation of plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in a biodiversity experiment JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/216986 SP - 216986 AU - Terhi Hahl AU - Sofia J. van Moorsel AU - Marc W. Schmid AU - Debra Zuppinger-Dingley AU - Bernhard Schmid AU - Cameron Wagg Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/11/09/216986.abstract N2 - Co-evolution between plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) may occur over short time spans. However, whether plants and AMF co-adapt and how this may be influenced by plant diversity has never been addressed.We carried out a plant–AMF experiment using five plant species and AMF selected over 11 years in plant monocultures or mixtures. Single plants were grown in sterile soil or soil inoculated with monoculture or mixture AMF or with a positive control (Rhizoglomus irregulare). We measured plant biomass, plant functional traits and AMF colonization.Mixture AMF were more beneficial than monoculture AMF for two plant species. Of the other three species, Veronica chamaedrys showed reduced performance with all tested AMF.Mixture-type plants generally grew better than monoculture-type plants, which suffered less leaf damage by pathogens. This suggests that plant mixtures were selected for increased growth at the expense of reduced defence and the opposite happened in plant monocultures.Cases of co-adaptation between AMF and plants from mixtures or AMF and plants form monocultures were rare and mostly in the direction of increased parasitism of the AMF, suggesting an arms-race leading to reduced performance of plant partners. ER -