Why do some of us feed the soil?

[Rasterman]

This is a pretty interesting link about the myriad associations between plant roots and beneficial microorganisms.

Rhizophagy Cycle: An Oxidative Process in Plants for Nutrient Extraction from Symbiotic Microbes

In this paper, we describe a mechanism for the transfer of nutrients from symbiotic microbes (bacteria and fungi) to host plant roots that we term the ‘rhizophagy cycle.’ In the rhizophagy cycle, microbes alternate between a root intracellular ...

www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov