Community interactions among microbes give rise to host-microbiome mutualisms in an aquatic plant.

Unlabelled: Microbiomes often benefit plants, conferring resistance to pathogens, improving stress tolerance, or promoting plant growth. As potential plant mutualists, however, microbiomes are not a single organism but a community of species with complex interactions among microbial taxa and between microbes and their shared host. The nature of ecological interactions among microbes in the microbiome can have important consequences for the net effects of microbiomes on hosts.

Evolutionary consequences of microbiomes for hosts: impacts on host fitness, traits, and heritability.

An organism's phenotypes and fitness often depend on the interactive effects of its genome (Gh⁢o⁢s⁢t), microbiome (Gm⁢i⁢c⁢r⁢o⁢b⁢e), and environment (E). These G × G, G × E, and G × G × E effects fundamentally shape host-microbiome (co)evolution and may be widespread, but are rarely compared within a single experiment. We collected and cultured L⁢e⁢m⁢n⁢am⁢i⁢n⁢o⁢r (duckweed) and its associated microbiome from 10 sites across an urban-to-rural ecotone.

Genetic architecture of multiple mutualisms and mating system in Turnera ulmifolia.

Plants often associate with multiple arthropod mutualists. These partners provide important services to their hosts, but multiple interactions can constrain a plant's ability to respond to complex, multivariate selection. Here, we quantified patterns of genetic variance and covariance among rewards for pollination, biotic defence and seed dispersal mutualisms in multiple populations of Turnera ulmifolia to better understand how the genetic architecture of multiple mutualisms might influence their evolution.

Why do sunflowers have invisible colors?

In the common sunflower, patterns of UV-absorbing pigments are controlled by a newly identified regulatory region and may be under the influence of environmental factors.

Mutualistic Outcomes Across Plant Populations, Microbes, and Environments in the Duckweed Lemna minor.

The picture emerging from the rapidly growing literature on host-associated microbiota is that host traits and fitness often depend on interactive effects of host genotype, microbiota, and abiotic environment. However, testing interactive effects typically requires large, multi-factorial experiments and thus remains challenging in many systems. Furthermore, most studies of plant microbiomes focus on terrestrial hosts and microbes.

Resilience to multiple stressors in an aquatic plant and its microbiome.

Premise: Outcomes of species interactions, especially mutualisms, are notoriously dependent on environmental context, and environments are changing rapidly. Studies have investigated how mutualisms respond to or ameliorate anthropogenic environmental changes, but most have focused on nutrient pollution or climate change and tested stressors one at a time. Relatively little is known about how mutualisms may be altered by or buffer the effects of multiple chemical contaminants, which differ fundamentally from nutrient or climate stressors and are especially widespread in aquatic habitats.

Magnetosome-containing bacteria living as symbionts of bivalves.

Bacteria containing magnetosomes (protein-bound nanoparticles of magnetite or greigite) are common to many sedimentary habitats, but have never been found before to live within another organism. Here, we show that octahedral inclusions in the extracellular symbionts of the marine bivalve Thyasira cf. gouldi contain iron, can exhibit magnetic contrast and are most likely magnetosomes.

Divergent chemosymbiosis-related characters in Thyasira cf. gouldi (Bivalvia: Thyasiridae).

Within the marine bivalve family Thyasiridae, some species have bacterial chemosymbionts associated with gill epithelial cells while other species are asymbiotic. Although the abundance of symbionts in a particular thyasirid species may vary, the structure of their gills (i.e.