Speaker
Description
Fruit scent plays a significant role in attracting animals, providing information on fruit ripeness, facilitating fruit selection and eventually contributing significantly to seed dispersal. Chemical signaling is often based on “generic” plant volatile organic compounds. But there is a significant exception: aliphatic esters. These compounds are prominent primarily in ripe fruits and mainly in species that rely on scent for disperser attraction. Previous studies assumed that the plant itself was the only source of esters, but is this true? Esters are synthesized from alcohols and acids, both of which can be products of microbial fermentation, and are strongly linked to sugar levels, the main reward animals seek. Thus, microbes may play a critical yet unexplored role in plant-frugivore interactions, turning a bipartite interaction into a tripartite one. However, increased microbial activity can accelerate fruit decay. This leads to the hypothesis that plants that rely on scent-driven animal seed dispersers have evolved to tolerate higher microbial activity to enhance their scent, thus creating a trade-off: increased attractiveness to seed dispersers at the cost of more rapid fruit decline. To establish a link between microbial taxa of interest and aliphatic esters, both chemical and molecular tools were used. Experiments conducted in various fruits including wild fig species belonging to two different groups: lemur-dispersed (lemurs are mainly olfaction-oriented), and bird-dispersed (birds tend to be vision-oriented). Initial results indicate a substantial difference in the microbial communities and occurrence of esters for different wild Ficus species from Madagascar. Notably, known fermenting microbial taxa were identified mainly in Ficus tiliifolia, the species that also exhibited higher amount of esters. Derived results could unveil a previously unseen key partner, providing a better and deeper understanding of the co-evolution between plants, animals but also microbes.
| Status Group | Doctoral Researcher |
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