Dr. Steven Kembel Université du Québec a Montréal Life on leaves : what are the drivers of phyllosphere bacterial diversity? The aerial surfaces of plants including leaves (the “phyllosphere”) are an important habitat for bacteria. Leaf-associated bacteria are extremely diverse and perform important ecological functions with implications for host plant health and ecology as well as for ecosystem function, but our understanding of the ecological and evolutionary drivers of plant-microbe associations on leaves has been relatively limited. Here I present two case studies of the factors that drive plant-bacteria associations across spatial and phylogenetic scales. In the first case study, we studied populations of the plant-associated genus Methylobacterium living on tree leaves in Quebec forests. Phylogenetically-informed ecological analyses of Methylobacterium diversity demonstrated the importance of environmental factors including temperature for driving dynamics of these populations in space and time. We observed consistent successional patterns of Methylobacterium on leaves throughout the growing season, which were explained by the evolution of ecological strategies within the genus. In the second case study at broader spatial and phylogenetic scales, we studied how the drivers of plant-bacterial associations on leaves varied along a latitidunal gradient from temperate to tropical forests in China. We found that factors including host plant attributes, the abiotic environment, space, and plant neighborhood effects jointly explained most of the variation in phyllosphere bacterial diversity and biogeography, but the importance of plant host attributes increased strongly with increasing latitude. Most phyllosphere bacteria were host-specialized, and the degree of specificity varied with latitude and host plant rarity. Taken together these results suggest avenues for predicting and managing plant microbiomes under global change.
BIO: Dr. Steven Kembel is Professor of Biological Sciences and Canada Research Chair in Plant Microbiomes at the Université du Quebec à Montréal (UQAM). Dr. Kembel completed his B.Sc. in Botany at the University of Manitoba, a M.Sc. and Ph.D. in Biology at the University of Alberta, followed by postdoctoral fellowships at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Oregon. His research program focuses on understanding the ecological and evolutionary processes that govern patterns of microbial diversity, and on the effects of microbes on host ecology and function in plant and animal microbiomes. Comments are closed.
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