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Identification of host plants and description of sclerotia of the truffle Mattirolomyces terfezioides

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Abstract

The truffle, Mattirolomyces terfezioides, is a hypogeous ascomycete with uncertain host relationships. The fungus has been regularly collected on sandy soils in the Carpathian Basin. During the study of the natural host plants of the fungus, strange, amorphous, belowground hyphal aggregates incorporating soil and sand particles have been found attached to the surface of the roots. The fruitbodies of M. terfezioides develop from these hyphal aggregates. This structure, similar to that formed by morels, could be interpreted as a sclerotium. Sclerotia were found both on roots of woody and herbaceous plants. To detect the roots colonized by M. terfezioides, a species-specific polymerase chain reaction was developed. Seven natural hosts of the fungus were identified by this method. No specificity regarding taxa or life form of the plants was found. The colonization of the roots by the septate hyphae of M. terfezioides was weak, particularly compared to the colonization by arbuscular–mycorrhizal fungi. This suggests that this fungus is not the dominant fungal partner of these plants. Therefore, using M. terfezioides as the only inoculum may be inappropriate in truffle cultivation experiments. Nevertheless, further in vitro experiments are needed to develop reliable knowledge on the still ambiguous symbiotic strategy of this fungus.

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Acknowledgement

The authors gratefully thank James M. Trappe for his valuable comments and for reviewing the manuscript before submission and also Franz Oberwinkler and Francois Buscott for the discussion. The work was supported by the Hungarian Research Fund (OTKA D048333 and K60887). The support of the János Bolyai Research Fellowship, awarded to G. M. Kovács, is also acknowledged. We thank Piroska Dózsainé Kerekes and Csilla Jónás for technical assistance.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Plant Anatomy, Eötvös Loránd University, Pázmány Péter sétány 1/C, 1117, Budapest, Hungary

    Gábor M. Kovács & Erzsébet Jakucs

  2. Department of Botany, University of Szeged, P.O. Box 657, Szeged, Hungary

    István Bagi

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  1. Gábor M. Kovács
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  2. Erzsébet Jakucs
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  3. István Bagi
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Correspondence to Gábor M. Kovács.

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Kovács, G.M., Jakucs, E. & Bagi, I. Identification of host plants and description of sclerotia of the truffle Mattirolomyces terfezioides . Mycol Progress 6, 19–26 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11557-006-0520-y

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