Phylogenomics reveal that plants colonized land together with their fungal symbiotic partners.

Most extant land plants establish a mutually beneficial relationship with soil fungi called mycorrhizal symbiosis. From their partners, plants get access to mineral nutrient and water resources transported via a fungal network that acts like an extension of their root systems. Using genetic and molecular tools, we showed that distant plant species use similar molecular mechanisms during the symbiosis. This similarity suggests that those mechanisms were inherited from their last common ancestor, a lineage that emerged from an aquatic environment 450 million years ago. Thus, this plant fungal interaction could have helped the first land plants without structures adapted to soil exploration to survive and colonize this new environment.