AT: Feeding your friendly backyard herbivore: co-evolution of native plants, insects and microbes

Native plants serve as the foundation for a rich ecosystem. For example, when we plant natives, we support a magnificent diversity of insects and microbes. These invisible but important interactions usually go unnoticed. Dr. Alison Ravenscraft will discuss some of the mechanisms that insects use to eat plants, focusing on their symbioses with microbes. These symbioses are often calibrated to the host plant’s chemistry, which helps to explain why insects benefit so much from native plants.

Dr. Ravenscraft is an Assistant Professor of Biology at the University of Texas at Arlington. She studies symbioses between insects and microbes, focusing on the insect gut microbiome. Her work integrates high-throughput DNA sequencing, culture-based assays, and experimental manipulations to understand the composition and function of symbiotic communities. She employs both complex microbiota (e.g. butterfly gut flora, with dozens to hundreds of members) and pairwise relationships (e.g. the bug-Burkholderia symbiosis) as mutually informative systems. Insects are instrumental to ecosystems as primary consumers, pollinators, and disease vectors; the ultimate goal of Ravenscraft Lab’s research is to understand how microbial symbionts impact these ecosystem-level processes.

Dr. Ravenscraft did her PhD at Stanford University, where she studied the structure and function of the butterfly gut flora. She began exploring the bug-Burkholderia system during a postdoctoral fellowship at the University of Arizona. She started as a professor at UTA in 2019.

The program begins at 6:30 pm, and will be followed by a brief Cross Timbers Chapter business meeting. You must register in advance. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.