Collaborative Research: Seed defense syndromes of tropical forest trees: emergent properties of seed dormancy, defense and microbial interactions

在过去的35年里，一个强大的植物防御理论已经发展起来，以解释为什么植物物种的毒性和营养组织的物理韧性不同。这一理论的应用拓宽了我们对植物-食草动物相互作用的理解，对植物生态学和进化产生了新的见解。 该项目现在将扩展该理论，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的获取和分配，以跟踪不断变化的环境或应对个别威胁。因此，能够攻击并杀死种子的真菌应该对一系列特征或种子防御综合征产生强烈的选择。该项目将量化18个树种的种子的化学和物理防御，这些树种在巴拿马的低地热带森林中表现出广泛的种子性状和发芽行为。实验将确定种子存活的时间过程，在不同时间后传播到土壤中的防御效果，以及特定防御与其他防御相关的方式，以形成种子防御性状的综合征。这项研究将为种子休眠的生态和进化重要性提供一个新的视角，并为一系列生态重要植物的种子防御综合征正式化迈出了第一步。该项目将在本科生、研究生和博士后阶段提供热带生态学、分子生物学和真菌生物学方面独特的跨学科培训，并将支持美国和拉丁美洲学生的研究和出版。研究方案和数据集将在双语项目网站上公布，研究结果将通过亚利桑那大学真菌标本馆的公共宣传方案传播。

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.