I am honoured to address as the seventh president of the Mycological Society of China. Mycorrhizal research has a long history in China, including taxonomy, diversity, ecology, molecular biology, and application. Particularly in the past four decades, great progress in mycorrhizal field has been made by Chinese mycologists and ecologists. In this paper, through my own experience, I summarised the main and important advance of recent mycorrhizal researches in terms of mycorrhizal fungal diversity, community, responses to global environmental changes, molecular biology, and function in China. Some perspectives are also proposed for future mycorrhizal studies in China.

Endophytic fungi are an important component, are ubiquitous and occur within all know plants, including a broad range of hosts in various ecosystems, and therefore play an important role in the natural environment. More than 1 million species of endophytic fungi are estimated to exist based on a ratio of vascular plants to fungal species of 1:4 or 1:5. Nevertheless, our recognition of endophyte diversity is limited at present. In surveys of endophyte diversity, traditional techniques, such as cultivation-dependent methods, have been routinely used in previous studies. The discovery of endophytic fungi in natural environments, however, has been limited by traditional methodology due to some non-sporulating and non-culturable fungi. Molecular techniques, such as DNA fingerprinting and sequencing methods, have been successfully employed in the detection and identification of endophytic fungi, and different endophyte diversity and community composition have been documented by cultivation-dependent and molecular techniques. This review paper summarises recent progress in the study of endophytic fungal diversity and some key questions are highlighted for future research in endophyte biology.

Arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungus community composition and diversity among the forest, grassland, and cropland ecosystems in the Tibetan Plateau were carried out in this study. A total of 44 AM fungi belonging to six genera were isolated from 144 soil samples collected from forest, grassland, and cropland. Of these AM fungi, 40 taxa were found in forest, 19 in grassland, and 19 in cropland. Glomus was the dominant genus in the three ecosystems, as well as Acaulospora was dominant in forest and grassland. Acaulospora laevis and A. scrobiculata were the dominant species in forest. Acaulospora laevis and Glomus mosseae were dominant in grassland and cropland. The spore density, species richness, and Shannon diversity index of AM fungi from high to low were forest > grassland > cropland. The Sorenson’s similarity coefficients of AM fungus community composition ranged from 0.58 to 0.63 between the forest, grassland, and cropland. The results revealed that there was high diversity of AM fungi and the AM fungal community composition varied among the three ecosystems.