Data from: Ancient plants with ancient fungi: liverworts associate with early-diverging arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi

Arbuscular mycorrhizas are widespread in land plants including liverworts,
some of the closest living relatives of the first plants to colonise land
500 MYA. Previous investigations reported near-exclusive colonisation of
liverworts by the most recently evolved arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, the
Glomeraceae, indicating a recent acquisition from flowering plants at odds
with the widely-held notion that arbuscular mycorrhizal-like associations
in liverworts represent the ancestral symbiotic condition in land plants.
We performed an analysis of symbiotic fungi in 674 globally-collected
liverworts using molecular phylogenetics and electron microscopy. Here we
show every order of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi colonises early-diverging
liverworts, with non-Glomeraceae being at least ten times more common than
in flowering plants. Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi in liverworts and other
ancient plant lineages (hornworts, lycopods and ferns) were delimited into
58 taxa and 36 singletons, of which at least 43 are novel and specific to
liverworts. The discovery that early plant lineages are colonised by
early-diverging fungi supports the hypothesis that arbuscular mycorrhizas
are an ancestral symbiosis for all land plants.