NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2021: Microbial mediation of genotype-phenotype relationships and ecological function of toxic nectar.

Francis, Jacob S, Davis CA

Investigators

Abstract

This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2021, Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions Between Genomes, Environment and Phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. Plants produce complex arrays of chemicals in their vegetation and flowers that impact the ecology at many levels. Many plant-produced chemicals are important to human society; they can be poisonous to livestock, cause crop disease, and offer natural chemical libraries for drug discovery. While the consequences of these compounds in vegetative tissues has been extensively studied, much less is known about how specialized chemicals in pollen and nectar impact plants’ interactions with pollinators and the microbes that live in flowers. Many flowers harbor communities of beneficial and/or pathogenic fungi and bacteria that can impact pollinator behavior and health. Through a combination of genomic studies, experiments, and simulation modeling, this project will test the link between plant genomes, plant chemistry, and pollinator behavior. During their tenure the fellow will develop a standards-aligned educational unit on nectar microbes for middle-school students. They will build on previous collaborations with non-profit education partners to deliver this unit to students in Reno and Sacramento, raising public recognition of microbe’s role in pollination. Given the important role of plant-microbe-pollinator interactions in natural and agricultural systems, a basic understanding of how plant chemistry shapes these interactions is particularly important. The fellow will focus on a highly bioactive class of nectar compounds, pyrrolizidine alkaloids, produced by the naturalized non-native plant purple viper’s bugloss, Echium plantagineum. The fellow will characterize the alkaloid content of the nectar and vegetation of 150 plants across three populations. Combining the metabolite profiling with de novo genomic analysis of these plants, they will identify genetic polymorphisms that influence the alkaloids in the nectar and leaves. In the same populations the fellow will collect and isolate nectar microbes from Echium and co-flowering species. They will test whether Echium-collected microbes are better able to grow in the presence of toxic alkaloids than other nectar microbes. Finally the fellow will test how microbial growth and nectar alkaloid content interactively impact nectar consumption by bumblebees. Throughout this process the fellow will receive extensive training in microbiological and genetic techniques from the sponsoring scientists that will add to a growing skillset in pollination and behavioral ecology. 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.