Department of Environmental Sciences, University of Toledo, Toledo, Ohio, USA.
Institute of Evolutionary Biology, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK.
Mol Ecol. 2022 Jun;31(11):3031-3034. doi: 10.1111/mec.16482. Epub 2022 May 6.
Plant galls are novel and sometimes dramatic plant organs whose development is initiated and controlled by parasitic microbes, nematodes, insects and mites. For arthropods, galls provide relative safety from enemies and abiotic stresses while providing nutrition. Galls are formed entirely by the plant, whose transcriptional pathways are modified and coopted to produce a structure specific to the galler species; they comprise a classic example of Dawkins' "extended phenotype". Arthropod-elicited galls are unique in that they are often anatomically complex (Figure 1a), with multiple differentiated tissue types (Figure 1b). A growing number of investigators have studied changes in hostplant gene expression to understand arthropod gall development. In this issue of Molecular Ecology, Martinson et al. (2021) report using RNA sequencing to explore tissue-specific gene expression associated with anatomical and functional gall complexity, demonstrating for the first time that gall tissues are as different transcriptionally as they are anatomically.
植物瘿是新颖的、有时甚至是引人注目的植物器官，其发育是由寄生性微生物、线虫、昆虫和螨类启动和控制的。对于节肢动物来说，瘿提供了相对安全的环境，免受敌害和非生物胁迫的影响，同时还提供了营养。瘿完全由植物形成，其转录途径被修饰和篡夺，以产生特定于瘿生物的结构；它们是道金斯（Dawkins）“扩展表型”的经典范例。节肢动物诱导的瘿是独特的，因为它们通常在解剖学上是复杂的（图 1a），具有多种分化的组织类型（图 1b）。越来越多的研究人员研究宿主植物基因表达的变化，以了解节肢动物瘿的发育。在本期《分子生态学》中，马丁森等人（2021 年）报告了使用 RNA 测序来探索与解剖学和功能复杂性相关的组织特异性基因表达，首次证明了瘿组织在转录水平上与解剖学水平一样不同。
