Meghana Gunturi L&S Biological Sciences
Functional Evolution of Citrus Limonoids in Drosophila
Plants synthesize a diverse array of chemicals that are hypothesized to serve as defenses to deter animal herbivory. The chemical ecology of these compounds has historically focused on the end products of complex, and largely incompletely characterized, plant biosynthetic pathways. However, how these biosynthetic pathways evolve and why a single plant produces such vast chemical diversity remains unresolved in the field of plant-herbivore chemical coevolution. My research will focus on addressing this gap in Citrus plants. These plants produce limonoids, a highly diverse class of specialized metabolites with over 20,000 known variants, many of which are synthesized within the same individual plant. My research will use three Citrus limonoids produced along a known triterpenoid biosynthetic pathway to understand how metabolic chemical modifications in plants shape post-ingestive effects in insects. I will use the model organism Drosophila melanogaster (fruit flies) and computer-vision enabled feeding assays to measure the compound toxicity and preference following fly consumption, therefore adding a functional dimension in the evolution of this specific biosynthetic pathway.
Message To Sponsor
I want to express a sincere thank you for your generous support of my summer research project. Through this funding alongside SURF, I am able to explore how plants' chemical diversity shapes organismal interactions in the world around us. There remain many unanswered questions within plant-herbivore coevolution, and I am incredibly honored to dedicate my summer to such important evolutionary research. Thank you so much for this opportunity and for allowing me to continue growing as a scientist.