Collaborative Research: Genes to ecology in tropical trees: how sharing resistance gene alleles affects pathogen transmission and growth

本项目研究邻近树木之间共享与病原体抗性相关的基因变异如何影响它们对病原土壤微生物感染的易感性或抗性，以及这如何影响它们在实验室和森林环境中的生长。这项研究还将确定抗性基因的变异是否会影响与树根相关的有益和致病微生物群落。这将对预测单个树的成功与否产生重要影响，这取决于它与具有相同和不同病原体抗性基因变体的个体的接近程度。这一知识对森林生态学具有重要意义，并将为具有良好抗病基因型特征的所有类型的植物物种的最佳种植安排提供新的见解。研究结果还将为研究宿主抗性基因多样性的物种差异如何影响整个森林群落的模型提供信息。该项目将通过为年轻科学家提供新的概念、工具、假设、结果、培训和专业发展机会，为农业方法提供信息，并促进森林地块长期生态研究的可持续性。该项目将培训博士后学者，并与史密森尼热带研究所的年轻科学家接触，指导他们如何将生理学和功能基因组学纳入生态学研究。携带一种特定抗性(R)基因等位基因的苏里南病毒幼苗在暴露于缺乏该等位基因的成熟树木的土壤中时，生长速度提高20%，但暴露于携带相同等位基因的成熟树木的土壤中时则没有优势，这与它们上调参与宿主防御的基因的能力存在相关差异。该项目将研究R基因等位基因共享环境如何影响根转录组、根微生物组、病原微生物培养以及通过托盘中共同生长的幼苗的不同空间网络传播病原体。互补田间试验将检验在森林中不同等位基因共享环境下种植的成对幼苗的表现。配套的监测研究将在巴罗科罗拉多岛（BCI）和巴拿马大陆附近的长期地块上检查标记的苏里南病毒树苗和成熟树木的基因型和长期生长速度。这些结果将为遗传变异如何影响植物防御、植物-微生物相互作用以及迄今为止机制模糊的概念（如植物-土壤反馈和负密度依赖）提供重要的新见解，这些概念日益成为森林动力学理论模型和树种多样性维持的焦点。一个最重要的特征是功能基因组学与长期生态研究数据的整合。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project examines how sharing variants of genes associated with resistance to pathogens among neighboring trees affects their susceptibility or resistance to infection by pathogenic soil microbes, and how this affects their growth in lab and forest settings. This research will also determine if variation in resistance genes impacts the beneficial as well as pathogenic microbial communities associated with tree roots. This will have important consequences for predicting the success of an individual tree depending on its proximity to individuals with the same and different variants of pathogen resistance genes. This knowledge has important implications for forest ecology and will provide new insights about the best planting arrangements for all types of plant species that have well characterized pathogen resistance genotypes. The results will also inform models that examine how species differences in the diversity of host resistance genes affect an entire forest community. The project will inform agricultural methods and contribute to sustainability of long-term ecological research in forest plots by providing new concepts, tools, hypotheses, results, training, and professional development opportunities for young scientists. The project will train post-doctoral scholars and reach out to young scientists working at Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute to mentor them on ways to include physiology and functional genomics in ecologicalStudies.Seedlings of Virola surinamensis carrying one particular resistance (R) gene allele have 20% greater growth rate when exposed to soil from mature trees lacking that allele, but no advantage when exposed to soil from mature trees carrying the same allele, with associated differences in their ability to upregulate genes involved in host defense. This project will examine how root transcriptomes, root microbiomes, cultures of pathogenic microbes, and transmission of a pathogen through different spatial networks of seedlings growing together in trays are affected by the R gene allele sharing context. Complimentary field experiments will examine performance of paired seedlings planted in different allele-sharing contexts in the forest. Complimentary monitoring studies will examine genotypes and long-term growth rates of tagged Virola surinamensis saplings and mature trees on long-term plots on Barro Colorado Island (BCI) and nearby mainland sites in Panama. The results will provide important new insights about the way genetic variation affects plant defense, plant-microbe interactions, and heretofore mechanistically vague concepts such as plant-soil feedbacks and negative density dependence that are increasingly the focus of theoretical models of forest dynamics and the maintenance of tree species diversity. An overarching feature is integration of functional genomics with data from a long-term ecological study.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.