Arbuscular mycorrhizal influence on zinc nutrition in crop plants – A meta-analysis

The effects of soil Zinc (Zn) deficiency on human health and productivity of livestock and crops are severe and thus increasing the Zn concentration in plant tissue (and/or its bioavailability to humans, which we cannot explicitly consider here due to lack of data) has to be a goal of modern, sustainable agriculture. In this meta-analysis, we quantitatively analyzed the potential role of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) in improving Zn concentrations in plant tissues for a variety of crops and soils. We performed a random-effects meta-analysis on 104 articles comprising 263 trials to test the influence of 10 independent variables on AMF-mediated Zn concentration in comparison to non-mycorrhizal control plants for above-, belowground, fruit and seed tissue. AMF had a positive overall impact on Zn concentration in all tissue types and this positive effect was modulated primarily by soil texture. Soil pH and soil Zn concentration affected AMF-mediated shoot Zn concentration soil P concentration influenced fruit Zn concentration. For our dataset, we concluded that AMF positively affected Zn concentration in various crop plant tissues under distinct environmental conditions.