Fungal Endophytes
Julian Cosner, Gaurav Pandharikar, Keaton Tremble, Jake Nash, Tomás A. Rush, Rytas Vilgalys, Claire Veneault-Fourrey
October 2025, Current Biology; DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2025.08.058
Summary
Organisms are commonly grouped into ecological guilds that reflect their shared resource use and similar ecological roles. The guild concept has been used to categorize the vast diversity of the fungal kingdom (estimated at 2.2–5 million species) into groups of fungi with common lifestyles, such as mycorrhizal symbionts, pathogens of animals and plants, and the group that is the focus of this primer — fungal endophytes of plants. Fungal endophytes have resisted scientists’ attempts to silo organisms into neat assemblages. Scattered across the fungal tree of life and lacking few diagnostic characteristics, they are defined less by what they are than by what they are not.
Citation
Cosner J, Pandharikar G, Tremble K, Nash J, Rush TA, Vilgalys R, Veneault-Fourrey C (2025). Fungal Endophytes. Current Biology 35(19), R904–R910. DOI:10.1016/j.cub.2025.08.05810.1038/s41586-025-09401-4