Lau, J. A. and L. G. Bolin. 2024. The tiny drivers behind plant ecology and evolution. American Journal of Botany 111:e16324.

Plants are the homes and hosts of a vast diversity of microbiota. These microbes help plants access nutrients, mimic plant hormones to alter plant traits, synthesize new compounds that help plants defend against enemies, and so much more. Their pervasiveness and power means that they also likely alter many of the phenomena long studied by plant ecologists and evolutionary biologists from plant coexistence to speciation. Ignoring microbes means that we may be under- or overestimating the magnitude of or misidentifying the proximal causes of several common outcomes in plant ecology and evolution. Yet, accounting for these cryptic copilots also is not easy because not only the presence of microbes, but also their community composition and evolutionary histories determine their effects. Here we describe the outsized roles microbial communities may play in three fundamental areas of plant ecology and evolution: maternal effects, phenotypic plasticity, and natural selection. These three topic areas are not exhaustive, and microorganisms likely influence many more study areas in plant biology (e.g., plant coexistence [Bever et al., 1997], the expression of genetic variation [O'Brien et al., 2019], and perhaps even reproductive isolation and speciation as observed in insect systems [Tiffin et al., 2001]). However, our goal is to demonstrate some of the potential consequences of ignoring these microscopic millions and to convince plant ecologists and evolutionary biologists that considering microbial effects in our experiments may improve our understanding of how things actually work in a natural world that is dominated not by plants and plant genes but by the microbes associating with them.

DOI: 10.1002/ajb2.16324

Associated Treatment Areas:

• LTER Research Context

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