A bumblebee buzz pollinates a tomato flower.ALEX M. MURPHY, SANJIE JIANG AND JOHN P. CARR Tomato plants infected with cucumber mosaic virus seem to be more attractive to their bumblebee pollinators than uninfected plants, according to scientists at the University of Cambridge, U.K., and their collaborators elsewhere. Mosaic virus infection is also associated with changes in the volatile compounds that that tomatoes emit, the researchers found, and the researchers suspect that these volatile compounds attract bumblebees to infected plants. Whereas in the absence of bumblebee pollination, mosaic virus–infected plants produced fruit with fewer seeds than uninfected plants, with bumblebee pollination, the infected plants produced as many seeds as their virus-free counterparts, according to a study published today (August 11) in PLOS Pathogens. Attracting pollinators could be the virus’s way of compensating host plants for the diminished seed production it otherwise causes, the study authors proposed.
“Viruses, they’re often seen as bad for the plant, as it were,” said study coauthor Simon “Niels” Groen, who is now a postdoctoral fellow at New York University. And in the absence of pollinators, Groen continued, that is the case with cucumber mosaic virus. “However, when pollinators are placed into the picture, it turns out that the infected plants are actually more attractive to the insects, to the pollinators, and that way, they actually produce just as [many] seeds . . . as the healthy plants would.”
“I thought it was very unique that perhaps this virus is conferring an advantage onto infected plants. In other words, they are more ‘visible’ to bumblebees, not through their vision, but through long-distance odor attraction, and then that ...
