Arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi-mediated rhizospheric changes: What is the impact on plant secondary metabolism?

It is commonly known that arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) inoculation may modulate several soil health quality indicators. In contrast, their role in altering the rhizosphere to promote the biosynthesis of plant bioactive compounds is often disregarded. Thus, this short review aimed at selecting research papers on this topic and describing what has been done already. Overall, terpene compounds were the most examined compound group, with soil enzyme activity assays being the most applied. In total, five papers were chosen, but only two of them linked AMF-induced rhizospheric modulation to increase the production of secondary metabolites, highlighting the need to test more plant species and different isolates to select which changes in the rhizosphere are more dependent on mycorrhizal inoculation and whether these strongly explain an enhanced accumulation of phytochemicals in mycorrhizal plants.