OOS 19
Probing the Microbial World of Flowers: Impacts on Plants and Animals

Tuesday, August 12, 2014: 1:30 PM-5:00 PM
308, Sacramento Convention Center
Organizer:
Scott H. McArt, Cornell University
Co-organizer:
Lynn S. Adler, University of Massachusetts
Moderator:
Matthew Boyer, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Flowers are major hubs of plant-animal interactions across the terrestrial world. Flowers also provide a microclimate highly conducive to microbes, which can influence plant and animal health and fitness. In plants, floral microbes range from mutualistic to pathogenic; such microbes are common in the wild and can be economically devastating in agricultural systems. For pollinators, flower-transmitted microbes also range from beneficial to pathogenic, yet we are just beginning to understand the importance of microbe transmission on pollinator health. Given recent concerns about pollinator declines caused in part by pathogens, knowledge of microbial transmission dynamics is crucial to understanding this pressing topic. This organized oral session will explore numerous ways in which flower-associated microbes are affected by floral traits and microbial community interactions, transmitted by and among pollinators, ultimately impacting plant and animal fitness. The session will be split evenly between plant-centric and animal-centric talks. A major goal of this session is to show that questions are often complementary between plant-centric and animal-centric researchers, and that approaches used in one discipline can be applied to the other discipline. Plant-centric talks will address processes of microbial community assembly in flowers, antimicrobial floral traits, microbial manipulation of floral traits, and microbe impacts on plant and animal fitness. Animal-centric talks will address the prevalence of flower-transmitted bacteria, viruses, and parasites, floral traits influencing transmission of beneficial and pathogenic microbes, and the influence of gut microbiota on modifying pollinator health upon exposure to flower-transmitted microbes.
1:30 PM
 Role of floral secondary compounds for pathogen transmission and establishment in pollinators
Lynn S. Adler, University of Massachusetts; Leif L. Richardson, Dartmouth College; Rebecca E. Irwin, Dartmouth College
2:10 PM
 Exploiting your host’s “dreams and desires”: Viral utilization of flower/pollinator interactions
Diana Cox-Foster, Penn Sate University; Rajwinder Singh, Penn Sate University
2:30 PM
 Nectar microbial community assembly and plant-pollinator mutualism
Tadashi Fukami, Stanford University; Rachel L. Vannette, Stanford University; Marie-Pierre L. Gauthier, Stanford University; Ashley P. Good, Stanford University; Caroline M. Tucker, University of Colorado, Boulder
2:50 PM
 Pollinator gut microbiota and flower-transmitted parasites
Hauke Koch, University of Texas at Austin; Paul Schmid-Hempel, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich; Nancy A. Moran, University of Texas at Austin
3:10 PM
3:20 PM
 Chemical ecology of a pollinator-vectored plant pathogen
Scott McArt, University of Massachusetts, Amherst; Cesar Rodriguez-Saona, Rutgers University; Juha-Pekka Salminen, University of Turku; Lynn S. Adler, University of Massachusetts
3:40 PM
 Microbial mediation of pollinator performance
Robert N. Schaeffer, Dartmouth College; Jessamyn S. Manson, University of Alberta; Rebecca E. Irwin, Dartmouth College
4:20 PM
 Flowers serve as a hub of transmission of putatively probiotic bacteria to wild bees
Quinn S. McFrederick, University of California, Riverside
4:40 PM
 Super-generalist flowers attract high numbers of bees and even higher numbers of non-bee flower visitors
Kate A. Zemenick, University of California, Davis; Jay A. Rosenheim, University of California