For a fungus, the right 'accessories' can make or break a relationship with a plant

Plants interact with a diversity of organisms over the course of their lifetime, but even very similar microbes can cause opposite reactions. Two strains of the fungus Fusarium oxysporum (Fo) share a core genome, but one is a beneficial endophyte while the other is a detrimental pathogen causing wilt and death. A new study, published in the Molecular Plant-Microbe Interactions journal, tried to tease apart why these two strains cause such opposite reactions, and more generally how plants respond differently to useful and harmful microbes, by exploring the interaction of these two strains with the model plant Arabidopsis.