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: 1120205
• 负责人: James Dalling
• 金额: $ 37万
• 依托单位: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• 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 2016-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1120205&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年中，已经开发出一种强大的植物防御理论来解释为什么植物物种在其营养组织的毒性和身体韧性中有所不同。该理论的应用扩大了我们对植物 - 生动相互作用的理解，从而对植物生态学和进化产生了新的见解。 现在，该项目将扩展理论，以涵盖种子对土壤中真菌的防御。 种子只有有限的能力来调整资源获取和分配，以跟踪不断变化的环境或打击个人威胁。因此，攻击并可以杀死种子的真菌应在特征或种子防御综合症的套件上创造强有力的选择。该项目将量化18种树种种子的化学和物理防御，这些种子在巴拿马低地热带森林中表现出广泛的种子特征和发芽行为。实验将确定种子存活的时间过程，分散到土壤后的不同时间的防御能力以及特定防御与其他人相关的方式形成种子防御性状的综合症的方式。这项研究将为种子休眠的生态和进化重要性提供新的观点，以及为一系列生态重要植物形式化种子防御综合症的第一步。该项目将在本科，研究生和博士后水平的热带生态学，分子生物学和真菌生物学方面提供独特的跨学科培训，并将支持美国和拉丁美洲的学生的研究和出版。研究协议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的下植物标本室的公共外展计划进行传播。