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Chemical communication between plants and herbivores
Chemical communication between plants and herbivores
Over hundreds of millions of years, the arms race between plants and herbivores has driven the evolution of an extraordinary diversity of plant defense chemicals to which herbivores must constantly adapt. While most previous studies have focused on the functions and patterns of specific chemical compounds at the species or genus levels, deciphering the community-level chemical communication is currently hampered by the lack of practicable methodological tools that would effectively scale up the number of interacting species without being overwhelmed by enormous amount of chemical information, and more crucially, by the lack of testable conceptual theories. In this project, by integrating information theory with ecological and evolutionary theories, we found that herbivore specialization and plant VOC (volatile organic compound) redundancy patterns can be nicely explained by information arms race between plants and herbivores.
Funding: Swiss National Science Foundation, Early Postdoc Mobility grant no. P2ZHP3_178087
Social-ecological effects on global changes and biodiversity
Social-ecological effects on global changes and biodiversity
Ecosystems' collapse around the globe is driven by both ecological and social-economic processes. However, very few studies seek to bridge social and natural science towards the holistic investigation of phenomena. This project aims to meet the challenges of integrating heterogeneous data from different disciplines, enabling a new generation of integrative analyses to address socio-ecological challenges in biodiversity and global change research.
In this innovation project from URPP-GCB (University Research Priority Programs on Global Change and Biodiversity) scheme, we will illustrate the interdisciplinary analysis using Borneo island as a showcase .
Funding: URPP-GCB, University of Zurich
Pollen nutrients and bee health
Pollen nutrients and bee health
Pollen provides essential nutrients including phytosterols that play essential structural and regulatory roles for pollen foragers including bees. Facing the ever-growing bee crisis in both natural and agricultural systems, we urgently need a more comprehensive understanding of the current situation of pollen nutrients and their effects on bee's health. Specifically, this project aims to investigate pollen nutrient (with a focus on phytosterols) diversity along plant taxonomy and phylogeny; to understand how biotic and abiotic environmental factors influence nutrient landscape; and to disentangle functional roles of pollen sterols on bee's development and population dynamics.
Read more: https://nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nph.17227
Predicting the evolution of floral scent
Predicting the evolution of floral scent
Floral scent can play dual functions in both attraction and deterrence. Adaptive evolution of floral scent to ecological selections (e.g. by pollinators and herbivores) have long been hypothesized but not explicitly tested. During my PhD, I used a model plant species Brassica rapa, and imposed artificial selection on four representative floral volatile organic compounds (VOCs) independently in paralleled design of experimental evolution studies to track their evolutionary trajectories.
The study provided the first direct estimation of floral scent heritability (the extent of genetic versus environmental sources of variation). Together with the information of genetic correlations among these chemicals and with other plant traits, I further predicted the short-term evolutionary changes of a suite of floral traits under both pollinator and artificial selections.
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