Jasmonate signaling makes flowers attractive to pollinators and repellant to florivores in nature

Abstract

Flowers are required for the Darwinian fitness of flowering plants, but flowers' advertisements for pollination services can attract florivores. Previous glasshouse work with Nicotiana attenuata revealed the role of jasmonate (JA) signaling in flower development, advertisement and defense. However, whether JA signaling mediates flowers' filtering of floral visitors in nature remained unknown. This field study revealed that silencing JA signaling resulted in flowers that produce less nectar and benzyl acetone, two pollinator-attractive traits. Meanwhile, flowers of defenseless plants were highly attacked by a suite of native herbivores, and damage to buds in native plants correlated negatively with their JA-Ile levels.

The defensive function of a pollinator‐attracting floral volatile

“…This functional dualism leads to the question of why BA is so strongly repellent to D. undecimpunctata beetles, but not to its hawkmoth pollinators? Interestingly, the emission of the flower volatile BA appears to be regulated by the jasmonic acid cascade, which also regulates plant defence (Li et al, ). D. undecimpunctata is highly sensitive to the main defence compounds of N. attenuata , the neurotoxin nicotine (Steppuhn et al, ), and are found feeding on the leaves of jasmonate‐deficient defenceless plants (Kessler, Halitschke, & Baldwin, ).…”

Chemical cues and genetic divergence in insects on plants: conceptual cross pollination between mutualistic and antagonistic systems

“…An even smaller number of studies explicitly link chemically-mediated herbivore and pollinator interactions to plant fitness or focus on communities of insects [38]. However, we are set to see this field grow with flower-feeding herbivores providing particularly tractable models [39]. Indeed, the constraints inherent in chemical pathways may enforce important connections between defence and pollination [40].…”

A Promiscuous CYP706A3 Reduces Terpene Volatile Emission from Arabidopsis Flowers, Affecting Florivores and the Floral Microbiome

“…Although the metabolic pathway leading to pyrethrin has now been elucidated (Kikuta et al, 2012;Xu et al, 2018), its direct impact on plant defenses has not been reported. In Nicotiana attenuata, one of the best described models of flower chemical ecology, a complex interplay between several plant pathways, signaling, and insects or hummingbirds has been observed in field studies, revealing different plant strategies to attract pollinators, and to deter or attract florivores (Euler and Baldwin, 1996;Kessler et al, 2010Kessler et al, , 2015Li et al, 2017Li et al, , 2018. In Brassicaceae and especially the Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) model, such a multipartite interplay largely remains to be investigated.…”