Endophytes as Subroutines

Fungi that live in plants can actively determine under what conditions its host-plant can grow or thrive.

If we swap out the endophytes (fungal/bacterial) of a plant that grows in salty soils for the endophytes used by plants thriving in hot geothermal soils then that plant can no longer thrive in salty soils. But it can now grow in hot geothermal soils and vice versa.

This, in my view, is more about epigenetics (the study of heritable traits, or a stable change of cell function, that happen without changes to the DNA sequence) than anything else.

Plants, animals and more are communities of genetically unrelated entities that forge a platform that is able to thrive for the benefit of all involved. Or, so it would seem. One thing is certain: The plant living in salty soil is able to do so not because of it's own genetics but because of it's interaction with a completely different genome.