Impact of Wild and Commercial Mycorrhizae on Stem Height and Biomass

Abstract

Our experiment is comparing the effect of wild versus commercial mycorrhizae on two different prairie plant species. Around 80% of plants associate with mycorrhizal fungi to acquire necessary resources (Rua et al., 2016). There is a large industry that revolves around selling commercial mixtures of mycorrhizae which claims to improve plant growth and crop yield. We hypothesize that the plant species that are inoculated with both the commercial and wild mycorrhizae would yield the best results. We conducted our experiment using four groups, a control group planted in sterilized soil and not inoculated, a group planted in sterilized soil and inoculated with the commercial brand of mycorrhizae, a group planted in soil with wild mycorrhizae, and the final group that was inoculated with both the commercial and wild mycorrhizae. Each seedling was planted into an individual container, received their treatment, and topped with sterile soil. During the first two weeks we recorded the survival of each plant, then the following three weeks we recorded the stem height and leaf count of each plant. After our recording our final data, we de-potted and dried each plant in order to measure the aboveground and underground biomass. We only found significant improvement in the leaf count of plants in the wild and commercial mycorrhizae treatment, supporting our hypothesis. No other data was significantly different. In future studies, they should extend data collection times, increase the number of plants per treatment group and increase variables analyzed to thoroughly explore this hypothesis.