Generation of Disproportionate Nuclear Genotype Proportions in Rhizophagus Irregularis Progeny Causes Allelic Imbalance in Gene Transcription.

Corrigendum to New Phytologist 231(2021), 1984–2001, doi: 10.1111/nph.17530. Approximately half of the single spore sibling lines (SSSLs) used in this study were initially set up as co-cultures between pairs of genetically different Rhizophagus irregularis isolates in a similar way to that described in Croll et al. (2009) and Angelard et al. (2010), and not as previously stated with one initial isolate. Individual spores originating from the co-cultures and mono-cultures were then maintained on non-mycorrhizal carrot roots as described in Robbins et al. (2021) to obtain the material necessary for ddRAD-Seq analysis. The co-culturing was originally performed in order to answer a different question about genetic exchange between pairs of genetically different Rhizophagus irregularis isolates. In the case of SSSLs originating from co-cultures, rather than mono-cultures, all offspring used in Robbins et al. (2021) appeared qualitatively identical (based on the presence and absence of alleles) to only one of the isolates in the original co-cultures, with no suggestion of any alleles originating from the other isolate, that is no genetic exchange took place. Fig. 2 of Robbins et al. (2021) clearly demonstrates this. Therefore, these SSSLs were assigned as offspring of the parental isolate to which they were indistinguishable. These data were then used for analyses to address the question of how much variation in allele frequencies at bi-allelic loci existed among SSSLs that shared the same parent. Whether or not the initial cultures were set up as co-cultures or not does affect the finding of the study on allele frequency variation among clonally produced SSSLs or the conclusions of this study in any way. We apologise to our readers for any confusion this may have caused.