From Ars Technica, an interesting study about the Pinyon pine and its fungal associations.
...
Researchers took seeds from drought-tolerant and drought-intolerant
trees, then exposed them to soil containing fungal communities from both
drought-tolerant and drought-intolerant roots. Even when grown with the
opposite soil, the seeds ignored the local fungal community; both
drought-tolerant and drought-intolerant seeds still cultivated the same
species of fungus as their adult forbears.
It turned out that the inheritance of the fungus is what actually
made the different trees drought-tolerant or drought intolerant; seeds
from drought-tolerant mothers only grew larger than their
drought-intolerant cousins when in the presence of their attendant
fungi. The tree’s genetics simply helped it recruit specific species of
fungi.
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