Impact of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi on crop and weed growth: potential implications for integrated weed managment
type: CreativeWork
description: With the growing problem of herbicide-resistant weeds, efficient and environmentally friendly non-chemical weed control approaches are needed to develop multi-tactic integrated weed management (IWM) programs. Using soil microbes for weed suppression has been considered as one of the non-chemical approaches, owing to the microbial potential for reducing weed growth and influencing weed community dynamics. However, successful use of soil microbes as classical biocontrol agents, which rely on importing control agents in the introduced environment, has been rare in agricultural fields. This is because agricultural practices can strongly change the soil and environmental properties in a way that reduce the population density of an introduced agent and result in an insufficient level of weed control. Therefore, conservation biocontrol approaches based on manipulating the population of residential enemies of target species that are well adapted to local environments, may hold more promise. In this study, I investigated whether arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), a group of widely distributed soil fungi, can have suppressive effects on weeds under field conditions varying in soil management practices, and thereby contribute to IWM in agricultural systems. AMF form symbiotic associations with more than 80% of land plants, and can strongly influence plant growth through impacts on nutrient and water uptake, stress tolerance, and pathogen defense. AMF can negatively influence the growth of some weeds, including many non-host weeds and some host weeds. Non-host weeds, which are resistant to the colonization of AMF, tend to have negative responses when interacting with AMF, based on several mechanisms. AMF can also inflict costs on host weeds when external nutrients, particular phosphorus (P), are abundant, or when the host weed is physically near a host crop species. Based on these facts, I hypothesized that AMF have the potential to contribute to weed control through direct an…
abstract: With the growing problem of herbicide-resistant weeds, efficient and environmentally friendly non-chemical weed control approaches are needed to develop multi-tactic integrated weed management (IWM) programs. Using soil microbes for weed suppression has been considered as one of the non-chemical approaches, owing to the microbial potential for reducing weed growth and influencing weed community dynamics. However, successful use of soil microbes as classical biocontrol agents, which rely on importing control agents in the introduced environment, has been rare in agricultural fields. This is because agricultural practices can strongly change the soil and environmental properties in a way that reduce the population density of an introduced agent and result in an insufficient level of weed control. Therefore, conservation biocontrol approaches based on manipulating the population of residential enemies of target species that are well adapted to local environments, may hold more promise. In this study, I investigated whether arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF), a group of widely distributed soil fungi, can have suppressive effects on weeds under field conditions varying in soil management practices, and thereby contribute to IWM in agricultural systems. AMF form symbiotic associations with more than 80% of land plants, and can strongly influence plant growth through impacts on nutrient and water uptake, stress tolerance, and pathogen defense. AMF can negatively influence the growth of some weeds, including many non-host weeds and some host weeds. Non-host weeds, which are resistant to the colonization of AMF, tend to have negative responses when interacting with AMF, based on several mechanisms. AMF can also inflict costs on host weeds when external nutrients, particular phosphorus (P), are abundant, or when the host weed is physically near a host crop species. Based on these facts, I hypothesized that AMF have the potential to contribute to weed control through direct an…
author: Li, Meng
language: en
keywords: Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, Integrated weed management, Crop, Weed, Tillage, Cover crop, Meta-analysis, Community strucuture
date published: 2017-08-10T20:32:52Z
date modified: 2026-07-22T22:24:34Z
provider: University of Illinois - Urbana-Champaign
publisher: Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations
type: WebPage
source organization: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

PropertyValue
property ID: Handle
value: http://hdl.handle.net/2142/97693