Zewei Song

University of Minnesota Twin Cities | UMN · Department of Plant Pathology

Fusarium crown rot (CR) of wheat is one of the most important diseases known from regions of the world where cereal crops are produced. In this study, we examined the mating types of F. culmorum CR strains isolated across Iraq, including more arid regions within the country. The result showed two mating compatibility (MAT) type idiomorphs of F. cul...

The routine use of high-throughput sequencing to profile microbial communities necessitates improved protocols for detecting and adjusting for variation among sequencing runs for marker gene analysis. Although mock communities are widely used as a control among runs, the composition and diversity of mock communities, in most cases, are orders of ma...

This article is a Commentary on Tedersoo et al., 217: 1370–1385.

Fusarium crown rot (CR) of wheat is one of the most important diseases known from regions of the world where cereal crops are produced. In this study, we examined the mating types of F. culmorum CR strains isolated across Iraq, including more arid regions within the country. The result showed two mating compatibility (MAT) type idiomorphs of F. cul...

Fusarium crown rot (FCR) is an important disease of wheat and other grains that has had a signifi cant impact on cereal crop production worldwide. Fusarium species associated with FCR can also produce powerful trichothecenes mycotoxins that pose a considerable health risk to humans and animals that consume infected grains. In this study we examined...

Decomposition of woody detritus is an important but often ignored process in forest ecosystems. Moisture and temperature regimes are dominant controls over woody decay, contributing to significant variability at local, regional, and global scales. Our focus was on local variability in woody decay rates depending on their physical position. Woody de...

Priority effects among wood decomposers have been demonstrated by manipulating fungal assembly history via inoculations in dead wood and then tracking community development using DNA sequencing. Individual wood‐degrading fungi have been shown, however, to initiate decay after having colonized living trees as endophytes. To track these ‘upstream’ co...

Fungi typically live in highly diverse communities composed of multiple ecological guilds. Although high-throughput sequencing has greatly increased the ability to quantify the diversity of fungi in environmental samples, researchers currently lack a simple and consistent way to sort large sequence pools into ecologically meaningful categories. We...

Next generation fungal amplicon sequencing is being used with increasing frequency to study fungal diversity in various ecosystems; however, the influence of sample preparation on the characterization of fungal community is poorly understood. We investigated the effects of four procedural modifications to library preparation for high-throughput seq...

The relative amounts of hyphal inoculum in forest soils may determine the capacity for fungi to compete with and replace early colonizers of wood in ground contact. Our aim in this study was to test the flexibility of priority effects (colonization timing) by varying the timing of inoculum introduction (i.e., precolonization) and amount of inoculum...

Correlating plant litter decay rates with initial tissue traits (e.g. C, N contents) is common practice, but in woody litter, predictive relationships are often weak. Variability in predicting wood decomposition is partially due to territorial competition among fungal decomposers that, in turn, have a range of nutritional strategies (rot types) and...

The biomass of brown and white rot fungi were estimated using ergosterol and quantitative PCR (qPCR). Each biomass estimate was compared with biomass measured gravimetrically from liquid cultures, as well as from three wood substrata at two decay stages. Fungal morphological changes in two different substrata, agar and pine, were measured using a c...

Background/Question/Methods Wood decomposition is primarily fulfilled by brown rot and white rot fungi in temperate and boreal forests. The balance between these fungi determines the patterns of wood decomposition and carbon cycle in forests. But this balance may shift in a warmer environment, especially in high latitude. Additionally, endophyte...

Many wood-degrading fungi colonize specific types of forest trees, but often lack wood specificity in pure culture. This suggests that wood type affects competition among fungi and indirectly influences the soil residues generated. While assessing wood residues is an established science, linking this information to dominant fungal colonizers has pr...

Background/Question/Methods Competition determines the structure and function of fungal communities. During wood decomposition, brown and white rot fungi utilize different forms of carbon while competing for the same space. It is possible that the dynamic of wood-degrading fungi is not driven alone by niche partitioning but also random processes i...

Background/Question/Methods Fungi are the major decomposers of wood in terrestrial ecosystem. There are two major groups of fungi that accomplish this – brown rot fungi and white rot fungi. In most of the cases, they are not substrate-specific, but remarkably little is known about how they coexist and compete. Because they degrade wood in unique w...

Based on the investigation at three 1 hm2 plots, the coarse woody debris (CWD) mass in a tropical seasonal rain forest in Xishuangbanna, southwest China was estimated, with its nutrients stock measured. The CWD mass on the three plots was averagely 16. 2 t - hm-2, occupying approximately 4% of the living aboveground biomass, among which, snag, fall...