A knight of symbiosis.
A knight of symbiosis.
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DOI：
10.1111/j.1469-8137.2007.02259.x
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发表时间：
2007-11
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
I. Alexander
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文献类型：
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作者：
I. Alexander
New Phytologist is pleased to offer its congratulations to Professor Sir David J. Read FRS, who was knighted in the 2007 Queen’s Birthday Honours list for services to Biological Sciences. David is currently Vice President and Biological Secretary of the Royal Society, a member of NERC Council, a member of the Macaulay Institute Board of Governors, Chairman of Rothamsted Research Board of Directors and Chairman of the Forestry Commission’s Advisory Committee on Forest Research. He is also Emeritus Professor of Plant Sciences at the University of Sheffield. To New Phytologist readers he will be more familiar as a productive and influential author of research papers on the biology of mycorrhizas, and coauthor of ‘Mycorrhizal Symbiosis’(Smith & Read, 1997), the essential reference text in the field. Throughout his career David has been a great supporter of New Phytologist, as both author and reviewer, and has published 77 papers in the journal! His first paper (Read, 1968) dealt with Brunchorstia infection of Corsican pine, and the most recent, but we hope not the last (Upson et al., 2007), reports the association of the ericoid mycorrhizal fungus Rhizoscyphus ericae with the Antarctic leafy liverwort Cephaloziella varians. The intervening 40 years have seen publication in New Phytologist of papers that both signpost the course of mycorrhizal research and have been instrumental in setting the mycorrhizal research agenda. Initially, the focus was on ericoid mycorrhizas, at that time a virtually unexplored symbiosis. In a remarkable sequence of papers in the journal spanning 25 years (‘The biology of mycorrhiza in the Ericaceae’, parts 1–20; 1973–1998), David, with his students and postdoctoral colleagues, provided the basis for our current understanding of these mycorrhizas and their central role in the ecology of heathland and boreal forest ecosystems. In recent years, the use of molecular methods to detect fungi in roots has revealed a much more diverse assemblage of potentially mutualistic fungi in ericaceous hair roots than was originally thought to exist (Selosse et al., 2007; Bougoure et al., in press). The functional significance of this diversity and what it tells us about the evolutionary and ecological relationships between ericoid mycorrhizal fungi and the ectomycorrhizal fungi with which they often co-occur (Vralstad, 2004; Setaro et al., 2006) are likely to be hot topics in the journal in the next few years. In the 1980s the Sheffield group turned their attention to ectomycorrhizas. The ground-breaking papers on the utilization of proteins and peptides by ectomycorrhizal fungi (Abuzinadah & Read, 1986), and on the translocation of 14C-labelled carbon between plants interconnected by a common mycelium (Finlay & Read, 1986), opened up research areas which continue to influence the research agenda and inform the interpretation of research into the ecology of ectomycorrhizal fungi in a wide range of forest ecosystems (Mayor & Henkel, 2006; Toljander et al., 2006; Koide et al., 2007). These studies led naturally into the more recent work on the mycorrhizas of initially, partially or fully mycoheterotrophic plants (eg McKendrick et al., 2000;
