We’ve been in the news recently, after the publication of a paper in Proceedings of the Royal Society Series B.  The paper is a collaboration between our lab and that of Jaap de Roode at Emory.  The first author is Leiling Tao, a post-doc with Jaap and a former grad student in our lab.

The new paper illustrates how interactions among four Biological Kingdoms influence dynamics of disease between monarch butterflies and their protozoan parasite.  The identity and abundance of mycorrhizal fungi (Kingdom 1) influence the cardenolide and phosphorus chemistry of milkweed plants (Kingdom 2).  In turn, milkweed chemistry determines how monarch butterflies (Kingdom 3) resist and tolerate their protozoan parasite (Kingdom 4).

Because around 90% of terrestrial plants host mycorrhizal fungi, the new work has implications for disease dynamics across diverse terrestrial systems.  It now seems that the medicinal properties of plants can’t be studied without reference to their symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi.

You can read the original press release here, and the associated news story in Science here.