NSFDEB-BSF: Building a broad understanding of the effect of polyploidy on the pollination niche and its cascading effects on plant-pollinator communities

University Of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh PA

Investigators

Abstract

Increases in the number of structures containing genetic material or amount of genetic material (genome size) in plants can manifest as changes in observable characteristics or traits of plants that affect their interactions with animals. Pollination is an important plant-animal interaction that sustains more than eighty percent of flowering plants and is a threatened ecosystem service. This research will uncover how changes in the size of plant genomes affects flowering plants and pollination. Thus, this research will broadly inform the robustness of a key ecological process to increases in the genome size of plants. Moreover, because increases in plant genome size are common among agricultural crops and noxious invasive weeds, this work will provide insights relevant to agricultural productivity as well to the threats posed to native biodiversity. The work will train undergraduate and graduate students, high school teachers, and a postdoc in computational biology, ecology and plant-pollinator interactions. Additionally, the research team will extend an urban biodiversity curriculum to evaluate community-level processes characterized by network analysis and tested for robustness via simulated extinctions. The research will combine powerful analytic approaches for the large-scale identification of genome size in taxa with novel acquisition of data on the pollination interaction, both from contemporary plant-pollinator networks and from pollen on the stigmas of herbarium specimens, across many thousands of plant taxa. The research will broadly test several fundamental hypotheses concerning the effects of genome doubling on pollination and plant-pollinator communities. In doing so, it will simultaneously transform our current understanding of a globally important biotic interaction and accelerate our understanding of one of the most pervasive evolutionary processes in plants. The work will extend the study of the effects of genome size changes to the community-level and determine how these changes uniquely contribute to aspects of community stability and the functioning of the earth’s ecosystems. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.