One sunflower gene change alters nectar sugar, bee visits, and nectar microbes
Tueux G, Pouilly N, Bernigaud Samatan J, Blanchet N, Boniface MC
Pollinators
The sunflowers in your garden may carry a domestication-era gene variant that changes their nectar sugars and makes them less attractive to bees, so choosing wild-type or heirloom varieties could mean more pollinator traffic.
Sunflowers with a broken copy of one sugar-splitting gene make nectar full of sucrose instead of the simpler sugars glucose and fructose. Bees visited those flowers less often in field tests, and the nectar hosted a different, more varied set of fungi. The broken gene is uncommon in wild sunflowers but is present in over a third of cultivated lines, so it likely spread as people bred the crop.
Key Findings
Plants homozygous for a loss-of-function HaCWINV2 allele produced sucrose-rich nectar and received fewer bee visits under field conditions, as measured by time-lapse monitoring.
In pollinator-excluded flowers, invertase-deficient plants had greater fungal diversity and compositionally distinct nectar communities, showing nectar sugar profile filters the microbiome.
The loss-of-function allele is rare in wild sunflowers but fixed in 35% of cultivated lines, indicating positive selection during domestication.
chevron_right Technical Summary
A single gene change that makes sunflower nectar rich in sucrose means fewer bee visits and a different mix of yeasts and fungi in the nectar. The change is rare in wild sunflowers but shows up in 35% of cultivated lines, so breeders selected it during domestication.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
A loss-of-function allele fixed during domestication reshapes nectar chemistry, microbial diversity, and pollinator visits.
Nectar is a hub for plant-pollinator interactions, yet gene-level causal links between plant genetic variation, pollinator foraging, and nectar microbial assembly remain poorly resolved. Using near...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
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