ArticleJournal of chemical ecology2020
Assessing Chemical Mechanisms Underlying the Effects of Sunflower Pollen on a Gut Pathogen in Bumble Bees.
Article in Journal of chemical ecology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 15 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
15 citing papers in PubMed, 30 citations in OpenAlex.
- Sunflower Pollen and Bumble Bee Health: Mechanisms, Modifiers and Trade-Offs.Ecology and evolution · 2026Review
- Food as Medicine: A Review of Plant Secondary Metabolites from Pollen, Nectar, and Resin with Health Benefits for Bees.Insects · 2025Review
- A guide to sunflowers: floral resource nutrition for bee health and key pollination syndromes.Frontiers in plant science · 2025Review
- Sunflower plantings reduce a common gut pathogen and increase queen production in common eastern bumblebee colonies.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Differential bumble bee gene expression associated with pathogen infection and pollen diet.BMC genomics · 2023Article
- The impact of mass-flowering crops on bee pathogen dynamics.International journal for parasitology. Parasites and wildlife · 2022Article
- Consuming sunflower pollen reduced pathogen infection but did not alter measures of immunity in bumblebees.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Natural processes influencing pollinator health.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Understanding effects of floral products on bee parasites: Mechanisms, synergism, and ecological complexity.International journal for parasitology. Parasites and wildlife · 2022Article
- Poison or Potion: Effects of Sunflower Phenolamides on Bumble Bees and Their Gut Parasite.Biology · 2022Article
- Sunflower pollen reduces a gut pathogen in the model bee species,Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2022Article
- Colony-Level Viral Load Influences Collective Foraging in Honey Bees.Frontiers in insect science · 2022Article
- The role of honey in the ecology of the hive: Nutrition, detoxification, longevity, and protection against hive pathogens.Frontiers in nutrition · 2022Review
- Article
- Chemical Ecology of Multitrophic Microbial Interactions: Plants, Insects, Microbes and the Metabolites that Connect Them.Journal of chemical ecology · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
10 authors at 4 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Many pollinator species are declining due to a variety of interacting stressors including pathogens, sparking interest in understanding factors that could mitigate these outcomes. Diet can affect host-pathogen interactions by changing nutritional reserves or providing bioactive secondary chemicals. Recent work found that sunflower pollen (Helianthus annuus) dramatically reduced cell counts of the gut pathogen Crithidia bombi in bumble bee workers (Bombus impatiens), but the mechanism underlying this effect is unknown. Here we analyzed methanolic extracts of sunflower pollen by LC-MS and identified triscoumaroyl spermidines as the major secondary metabolite components, along with a flavonoid quercetin-3-O-hexoside and a quercetin-3-O-(6-O-malonyl)-hexoside. We then tested the effect of triscoumaroyl spermidine and rutin (as a proxy for quercetin glycosides) on Crithidia infection in B. impatiens, compared to buckwheat pollen (Fagopyrum esculentum) as a negative control and sunflower pollen as a positive control. In addition, we tested the effect of nine fatty acids from sunflower pollen individually and in combination using similar methods. Although sunflower pollen consistently reduced Crithidia relative to control pollen, none of the compounds we tested had significant effects. In addition, diet treatments did not affect mortality, or sucrose or pollen consumption. Thus, the mechanisms underlying the medicinal effect of sunflower are still unknown; future work could use bioactivity-guided fractionation to more efficiently target compounds of interest, and explore non-chemical mechanisms. Ultimately, identifying the mechanism underlying the effect of sunflower pollen on pathogens will open up new avenues for managing bee health.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.