Quantifying the growth of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi: usefulness of the fractal dimension
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The present study is, to the best of our knowledge, the first to investigate the use of the fractal dimension (FD) to quantify the growth and development of undisturbed, fully functional arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) hyphae developing in vitro. The majority of the work focused on the model AM fungus Glomus intraradices DAOM 181602. The time course study and final measurements of an intact mature extraradical mycelium allowed us to compare the development of the mycelium and the FD value. The final FD value of 1.62 for the mature mycelium is similar to that obtained for highly branched root systems and tree crowns. The FD method was used to characterize the morphology of germinative and presymbiotic hyphae in the presence of stimulatory (strigolactone GR-24, 0.1 µmol·L–1and bisphenol A, 10 µmol·L–1) and inhibitory (NaCl, 80 mmol·L–1) molecules, and the extraradical phase in the presence of an inhibitory molecule (NaCl, 80 mmol·L–1). Where possible, results were compared with those obtained using the traditional grid-line (GL) technique. The FD approach allowed treatment effects to be accurately quantified, both in germinative and extraradical phases. In the second case, this technique provided a single quantitative value of extraradical hyphal growth that included runner hyphae (RH) networks, and fine-branching (FB) ramifications. This is in contrast to the GL technique, which provides a value for the estimation of RH, but which is not suitable for accurately measuring FB hyphae. Given the ease with which the FD values can be calculated, and the fact that this method can provide a single value for the quantification of extraradical hyphal growth and development, we suggest that this method is useful for in vitro studies. Furthermore under certain situations of germinative or presymbiotic growth, it may be used in concert with the GL method to provide a greater degree of information about hyphal morphology. The usefulness and limits of the FD method at different stages of the AM fungal growth cycle are discussed.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".