ABSTRACT
Dan Funck Jensen, Magnus Karlsson, and Björn D. Lindahl
38.1 INTRODUCTION
Knowledge about fungal biology in terms of detailed information and mechanistic understanding is rapidly increasing, in particular with regard to a handful of wellstudied model organisms in laboratory settings. However, fungi evolved neither in the laboratory nor in isolation. In natural ecosystems, a myriad of fungal genotypes and species interact in complex spatial and temporal patterns. The biology of individual fungi has to be viewed in the perspective of their interaction with other fungi, with which they share habitats. Such interactions exert a major effect on phenotypes in terms of antagonistic stress, altered resource availability, and physical and chemical habitat modi›cations, and, sometimes, they even involve biomass losses due to mycoparasitism. Thus, to gain insights in how fungal genotypes are expressed in the real world, we have to move from laboratory studies of single isolates toward more complex experimental settings or ›eld studies, where fungal interactions constrain, or sometimes facilitate, proliferation in already-occupied habitats. Such increase in realism and relevance has hitherto been accompanied by loss of precision in terms of mechanistic detail
and statistical variance (Read and Perez-More 2003). However, the advent of novel metatranscriptomics techniques (Kuske et al. 2015) provides new tools that may enable detailed studies of genotype expression in complex fungal communities.
