Biased pollen transfer by bumblebees favors the paternity of virus-infected plants in cross-pollination

Alex M Murphy; Sanjie Jiang; James A D Elderfield; Adrienne E Pate; Chay Halliwell; Beverley J Glover; Nik J Cunniffe; John P Carr

doi:10.1016/j.isci.2023.106116

Biased pollen transfer by bumblebees favors the paternity of virus-infected plants in cross-pollination

iScience. 2023 Feb 24;26(3):106116. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2023.106116. eCollection 2023 Mar 17.

Authors

Alex M Murphy¹, Sanjie Jiang¹, James A D Elderfield¹, Adrienne E Pate¹, Chay Halliwell¹, Beverley J Glover¹, Nik J Cunniffe¹, John P Carr¹

Affiliation

¹ Department of Plant Sciences, University of Cambridge, Downing Street, Cambridge, CB2 3EA United Kingdom.

Abstract

We used a green fluorescent protein marker gene for paternity analysis to determine if virus infection affected male reproductive success of tomato in bumblebee-mediated cross-pollination under glasshouse conditions. We found that bumblebees that visited flowers of infected plants showed a strong preference to subsequently visit flowers of non-infected plants. The behavior of the bumblebees to move toward non-infected plants after pollinating virus-infected plants appears to explain the paternity data, which demonstrate a statistically significant ∼10-fold bias for fertilization of non-infected plants with pollen from infected parents. Thus, in the presence of bumblebee pollinators, CMV-infected plants exhibit enhanced male reproductive success.

Keywords: Interaction of plants with organisms; Plant ecology; Plant pathology; Plant products.