Speaker
Description
Plants, like many other organisms, produce a tremendous variety of secondary compounds that are crucial to interspecific and intraspecific interactions, as well as to adaptation to environmental changes. This chemical diversity has been attributed to multiple factors such as function (e.g. defense, pollinator attraction), tissue-specific needs, various constraints, and phylogenetic history. Yet the interplay between these multiple factors driving plant chemodiversity is still unclear, primarily because the vast majority of studies focused on a single organ - (mostly leaves), or when comparing different organs, focused on single taxa. As such, the interplay between function and phylogenetic effects remains unclear. Using a novel model system of wild figs from Madagascar, this study tests (a) the degree to which phylogeny explains variation in fruit and leaf chemodiversity (b) to what degree phytochemical diversity is explained by tissue-specific function.
We applied an untargeted metabolomics approach to unripe fruits and leaves from eight species of wild figs (Ficus spp) sampled in a tropical rainforest in Madagascar. We characterized their chemical profiles using ultra-performance liquid chromatography-mass spectrometry and, using six genetic markers, reconstructed their phylogeny to understand the patterns of chemodiversity. We found a significant, but moderate phylogenetic effect in fruit chemodiversity, and no phylogenetic effect in leaf chemodiversity. Fruit and leaf metabolomes were more similar to the same tissue in other species than to the other tissue within the species. Our results indicate that, while phylogeny plays a role in plant chemodiversity, functional convergence of tissue-specific metabolites is a major driver of plant chemodiversity.
| Status Group | Doctoral Researcher |
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