Fungal-bacterial interactions.

Fungal-bacterial interactions span mutualistic nutrient exchange and antagonistic iron competition, with endosymbiotic bacteria in Mucoromycota fungi and free-living partners on edible fungi as key systems.

• Why it matters: The field is emerging because fungi and bacteria co-occur in many habitats, shaping host microbiomes and nutrient cycling in context-dependent ways that remain hard to resolve mechanistically.
• What they did: The primer synthesizes evidence from molecular genetics, genomics, and microscopy, emphasizing fluorescence and electron microscopy for endosymbiont intracellular localization, and highlights newer high-throughput -omics plus AI-enabled analyses.
• The result: Using these well-studied systems—Mucoromycota intracellular endosymbionts and edible-fungus-associated free-living bacteria—supports emerging principles and suggests AI can extract new biology from existing genomic datasets.

AI summary of the abstract · may contain errors · not medical advice · read the paper.