Sharing pollinators and pollen-associated viruses: understanding the diversity of the pollen virome within a co-flowering community

Co-flowering plant species frequently share pollinators, flower-inhabiting bacteria, and fungi, but whether pollen-associated viruses are shared is unknown. Given that pollen-associated viruses are sexually transmitted diseases, their diversity is expected to increase with pollinator sharing. We conducted a metagenomic study to identify pollen-associated viruses from 18 co-flowering plant species to determine whether 1) life history, floral traits, or pollination generalism were associated with viral richness, and 2) plants shared pollen-associated viruses. We demonstrated that pollination generalism influences pollen-associated virus richness and the extent of pollen virus sharing between plant species. We also revealed that perenniality, multiple flowers, and bilateral floral symmetry were associated with high pollen viral richness locally, confirming and extending patterns observed previously at a continental scale. Our results highlight the importance of plant-pollinator interaction..., , , # Sharing pollinators and pollen-associated viruses: understanding the diversity of the pollen virome within a co-flowering community

##### November 26, 2024; updated May 30, 2025 and June 2, 2025

This Dryad repository contains all data and R code for \"Sharing Pollinators and Viruses: Virus Diversity of Pollen in a Co-Flowering Community\" by Fetters et al.

##### Plant trait input data and PCA R code

**PollenVirome_PlantTraitPCAInput.csv** contains floral and pollen grain trait data that was measured on 10 flowers per plant species by Wei et al. (2021) and used to conduct the principal component analysis (PCA) described in the manuscript.

##### List of variables:

Plant_species: the names of the 18 focal plant species
Flower_shape: general morphology of the flowers of a plant species; open (aster-like, coded as 0) vs. closed (labiate or salverform, coded as 1)
Flower_symmetry: symmetry of the flowers of a plant species; radial (coded as 0) vs. bilateral (coded as 1)
Flower_restricti...,