Dataset Information

Elevated temperature drives a shift from selfing to outcrossing in the insect-pollinated legume, faba bean (Vicia faba).

ABSTRACT: Climate change can threaten the reproductive success of plants, both directly, through physiological damage during increasingly extreme weather events, and indirectly, through disruption of plant-pollinator interactions. To explore how plant-pollinator interactions are modified by extreme weather, we exposed faba bean (Vicia faba) plants to elevated temperature for 5 d during flowering, simulating a heatwave. We then moved the plants to flight cages with either bumblebees or no pollinators, or to two field sites, where plants were enclosed in mesh bags or pollinated by wild insect communities. We used a morphological marker to quantify pollen movement between experimental plants. There was a substantial increase in the level of outcrossing by insect pollinators following heat stress. Proportion outcrossed seed increased from 17 % at control temperature, to 33 % following heat stress in the flight cages, and from 31 % to 80 % at one field site, but not at the other (33 % to 32 %). Abiotic stress can dramatically shift the relative contributions of cross- and self-pollination to reproduction in an insect pollinated plant. The resulting increases in gene flow have broad implications for genetic diversity and functioning of ecosystems, and may increase resilience by accelerating the selection of more stress-tolerant genotypes.

SUBMITTER: Bishop J

PROVIDER: S-EPMC5429019 | biostudies-literature | 2017 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Elevated temperature drives a shift from selfing to outcrossing in the insect-pollinated legume, faba bean (Vicia faba).

Bishop Jacob J Jones Hannah E HE O'Sullivan Donal M DM Potts Simon G SG

Journal of experimental botany 20170401 8

Climate change can threaten the reproductive success of plants, both directly, through physiological damage during increasingly extreme weather events, and indirectly, through disruption of plant-pollinator interactions. To explore how plant-pollinator interactions are modified by extreme weather, we exposed faba bean (Vicia faba) plants to elevated temperature for 5 d during flowering, simulating a heatwave. We then moved the plants to flight cages with either bumblebees or no pollinators, or t ...[more]

PMID: 27927999

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Project description:BackgroundFaba bean is an important starch-based protein crop produced worldwide. Soil acidity and aluminium toxicity are major abiotic stresses affecting its production, so in regions where soil acidity is a problem, there is a gap between the potential and actual productivity of the crop. Hence, we set out to evaluate acidity and aluminium tolerance in a range of faba bean germplasm using solution culture and pot experiments.MethodsA set of 30 accessions was collected from regions where acidity and aluminium are or are not problems. The accessions were grown in solution culture and a subset of 10 was grown first in peat and later in perlite potting media. In solution culture, morphological parameters including taproot length, root regrowth and root tolerance index were measured, and in the pot experiments the key measurements were taproot length, plant biomass, chlorophyll concentration and stomatal conductance.ResultResponses to acidity and aluminium were apparently independent. Accessions Dosha and NC 58 were tolerant to both stress. Kassa and GLA 1103 were tolerant to acidity showing less than 3% reduction in taproot length. Aurora and Messay were tolerant to aluminium. Babylon was sensitive to both, with up to 40% reduction in taproot length from acidity and no detectable recovery from Al3+ challenge.DiscussionThe apparent independence of the responses to acidity and aluminium is in agreement with the previous research findings, suggesting that crop accessions separately adapt to H+ and Al3+ toxicity as a result of the difference in the nature of soil parent materials where the accession originated. Differences in rankings between experiments were minor and attributable to heterogeneity of seed materials and the specific responses of accessions to the rooting media. Use of perlite as a potting medium offers an ideal combination of throughput, inertness of support medium, access to leaves for detection of their stress responses, and harvest of clean roots for evaluation of their growth.

Dataset Information

Elevated temperature drives a shift from selfing to outcrossing in the insect-pollinated legume, faba bean (Vicia faba).

Publications

Elevated temperature drives a shift from selfing to outcrossing in the insect-pollinated legume, faba bean (Vicia faba).

Similar Datasets

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