Congratulations to Dr. Chujin Ruan, for publication of "Fungal Hyphae Regulate Bacterial Diversity and Plasmid-Mediated Functional Novelty During Range Expansion" in Current Biology (5-year impact factor 12.621), a leading journal in the Cell press series of biological cross-sectional science.

The study investigated the role of fungal hyphae-mediated dispersal on regulating bacterial diversity during range expansion, and systematically simulated and revealed the influence and regulatory mechanism of fungal hyphae on the formation process of spatial self-assembled structure and the horizontal gene transfer process of bacterial communities. The results showed that fungal hyphae structure and microscopic water network have positive regulatory effects on the maintenance of microbial diversity, the degree of range expansion and horizontal gene transfer.

This study provides a new perspective on fungal-bacterial interactions and, to some extent, resolves the mechanisms that maintain bacterial diversity in the environment and the paradoxes that form with range expansion. Dr. Ruan Chujin of the SWEB group and Dr. Josep Ramoneda are the co-first author of the paper, and Prof. Wang Gang and Prof. David R. Johnson of the Swiss Federal Institute for Water Science and Technology are the co-corresponding authors (China Agricultural University is the first unit of the paper).

The full paper is available at: https://authors.elsevier.com/c/1gAXX3QW8R~fHp