Using Herbarium Specimens to Explore Environmental Drivers of Plant-Fungal Symbiosis
Fungal endophytes are commonly thought to confer protection to their grass hosts against environmental stress. Many contemporary surveys have documented spatial patterns in the prevalence of the symbiosis, and we expect the symbiosis should be most common where it provides the greatest benefit to hosts, suggesting that environmental factors may determine the distribution. At the same time, environmental conditions global climate change and human disturbance have been shifting the spatial template of stress that plants face. Fungal symbionts are preserved within the tissues of dried plants stored in herbaria, providing an opportunity to explore historical patterns of endophyte prevalence across hosts' geographic distributions. If mutualists are expected to confer benefits to environmental stress, changing climates may be expected to alter the outcome and prevalence of the interaction across time to track changes in environmental conditions. Using seeds collected from herbaria, I am quantifying changes in the prevalence of symbiosis infection prevalence. This project has the potential to address basic questions about what drives endophyte symbiosis at broad scales and will quantify the effects of global change on a microbial mutualistic interaction.
You can find a video of my recent talk on this project at the 2021 American Society of Naturalists Meeting here: