Collaborative Research: Seed defense syndromes of tropical forest trees: emergent properties of seed dormancy, defense and microbial interactions

合作研究：热带林木种子防御综合症：种子休眠、防御和微生物相互作用的新兴特性

• 批准号: 1119758
• 负责人: Anne Arnold
• 金额: $ 10万
• 依托单位: University of Arizona
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2011
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2011-10-01 至 2015-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1119758&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Collaborative; Research; Seed; defense; syndromes

Over the past 35 years, a robust theory of plant defenses has been developed to explain why plant species vary in the toxicity and physical toughness of their vegetative tissues. Application of this theory has broadened our understanding of plant-herbivore interactions, yielding new insights into plant ecology and evolution. This project will now extend the theory to cover defenses of seeds against fungi in the soil. Seeds have only a limited capacity to adjust resource acquisition and allocation to track a changing environment or to combat individual threats. Fungi that attack and can kill seeds should therefore create strong selection on suites of characteristics, or seed defense syndromes. This project will quantify the chemical and physical defenses of seeds of 18 tree species that exhibit a broad range of seed traits and germination behavior in lowland tropical forest in Panama. Experiments will determine the time course of seed survival, the efficacy of defenses at different times following dispersal onto the soil, and the ways in which particular defenses correlate with others to form syndromes of seed defensive traits. The study will offer a new perspective on the ecological and evolutionary importance of seed dormancy and a first step towards formalizing seed defense syndromes for an array of ecologically important plants. The project will provide unique, cross-disciplinary training in tropical ecology, molecular biology, and fungal biology at the undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral levels and will support research and publication by students from the United States and Latin America. Research protocols and data sets will be posted on a bilingual, project website, and results will be disseminated through the public outreach programs of the Mycological Herbarium of the University of Arizona.

在过去的 35 年里，一个强有力的植物防御理论已经发展起来，可以解释为什么植物物种的营养组织的毒性和物理韧性各不相同。该理论的应用拓宽了我们对植物与草食动物相互作用的理解，对植物生态和进化产生了新的见解。 该项目现在将将该理论扩展到涵盖种子对土壤中真菌的防御。 种子调整资源获取和分配以跟踪不断变化的环境或对抗个体威胁的能力有限。因此，攻击并杀死种子的真菌应该对一系列特征或种子防御综合症产生强烈的选择。该项目将量化 18 种树种种子的化学和物理防御能力，这些树种在巴拿马低地热带森林中表现出广泛的种子性状和发芽行为。实验将确定种子存活的时间过程、传播到土壤后不同时间的防御功效，以及特定防御与其他防御相互关联以形成种子防御性状综合症的方式。该研究将为种子休眠的生态和进化重要性提供新的视角，并为一系列具有重要生态意义的植物的种子防御综合症的正式化迈出第一步。该项目将为本科生、研究生和博士后提供热带生态学、分子生物学和真菌生物学方面独特的跨学科培训，并将支持来自美国和拉丁美洲的学生的研究和出版。研究方案和数据集将发布在双语项目网站上，结果将通过亚利桑那大学真菌植物标本馆的公共外展计划传播。