Dataset Information

Domestication impacts on plant-herbivore interactions: a meta-analysis.

ABSTRACT: For millennia, humans have imposed strong selection on domesticated crops, resulting in drastically altered crop phenotypes compared with wild ancestors. Crop yields have increased, but a long-held hypothesis is that domestication has also unintentionally decreased plant defences against herbivores. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a phylogenetically controlled meta-analysis comparing insect herbivore resistance and putative plant defence traits between crops and their wild relatives. Our database included 2098 comparisons made across 73 crops in 89 studies. We found that domestication consistently reduced plant resistance to herbivores, although the magnitude of the effects varied across plant organs and depended on how resistance was measured. However, domestication had no consistent effects on the specific plant defence traits underlying resistance, including secondary metabolites and physical feeding barriers. The values of these traits sometimes increased and sometimes decreased during domestication. Consistent negative effects of domestication were observed only when defence traits were measured in reproductive organs or in the plant organ that was harvested. These results highlight the complexity of evolution under domestication and the need for an improved theoretical understanding of the mechanisms through which agronomic selection can influence the species interactions that impact both the yield and sustainability of our food systems.This article is part of the themed issue 'Human influences on evolution, and the ecological and societal consequences'.

SUBMITTER: Whitehead SR

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5182430 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Jan

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Domestication impacts on plant-herbivore interactions: a meta-analysis.

Whitehead Susan R SR Turcotte Martin M MM Poveda Katja K

Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences 20170101 1712

For millennia, humans have imposed strong selection on domesticated crops, resulting in drastically altered crop phenotypes compared with wild ancestors. Crop yields have increased, but a long-held hypothesis is that domestication has also unintentionally decreased plant defences against herbivores. To test this hypothesis, we conducted a phylogenetically controlled meta-analysis comparing insect herbivore resistance and putative plant defence traits between crops and their wild relatives. Our d ...[more]

PMID: 27920379

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Project description:The phyllosphere supports a tremendous diversity of microbes and other organisms. However, little is known about the colonization and survival of pathogenic and beneficial bacteria alone or together in the phyllosphere across the whole plant life-cycle under herbivory, which hinders our ability to understand the role of phyllosphere bacteria on plant performance. We addressed these questions in experiments using four genetically and biogeographically diverse accessions of Arabidopsis thaliana, three ecologically important bacterial strains (Pseudomonas syringae DC3000, Xanthomonas campestris, both pathogens, and Bacillus cereus, plant beneficial) under common garden conditions that included fungus gnats (Bradysia spp.). Plants supported greater abundance of B. cereus over either pathogenic strain in the phyllosphere under such greenhouse conditions. However, the Arabidopsis accessions performed much better (i.e., early flowering, biomass, siliques, and seeds per plant) in the presence of pathogenic bacteria rather than in the presence of the plant beneficial B. cereus. As a group, the plants inoculated with any of the three bacteria (Pst DC3000, Xanthomonas, or Bacillus) all had a higher fitness than uninoculated controls under these conditions. These results suggest that the plants grown under the pressure of different natural enemies, such as pathogens and an herbivore together perform relatively better, probably because natural enemies induce host defense against each other. However, in general, a positive impact of Bacillus on plant performance under herbivory may be due to its plant-beneficial properties. In contrast, bacterial species in the mixture (all three together) performed poorer than as monocultures in their total abundance and host plant growth promotion, possibly due to negative interspecific interactions among the bacteria. However, bacterial species richness linearly promoted seed production in the host plants under these conditions, suggesting that natural enemies diversity may be beneficial from the host perspective. Collectively, these results highlight the importance of bacterial community composition on plant performance and bacterial abundance in the phyllosphere.

Dataset Information

Domestication impacts on plant-herbivore interactions: a meta-analysis.

Publications

Domestication impacts on plant-herbivore interactions: a meta-analysis.

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