Passive accumulation of alkaloids in inconspicuously colored frogs refines the evolutionary paradigm of acquired chemical defenses.

Understanding the origins of novel, complex phenotypes is a major goal in evolutionary biology. Poison frogs of the family Dendrobatidae have evolved the novel ability to acquire alkaloids from their diet for chemical defense at least three times. However, taxon sampling for alkaloids has been biased towards colorful species, without similar attention paid to inconspicuous ones that are often assumed to be undefended.

Neighbourhood effects on herbivory damage and chemical profiles in short-rotation coppice willows and their hybrids.

Short rotation coppices (SRCs) represent an important source of biomass. Since they are grown in various mixtures, SRCs represent an excellent opportunity for assessing the effects of local plant neighbourhoods on their performance. We used a common garden experiment consisting of plots that varied in genotype diversity of SRC willows to test for the effects of chemical traits of individual plants and chemical variation in the plots where they grew on insect herbivory.

Phylogenetic insights into the Salicaceae: The evolution of willows and beyond.

The Salicaceae includes approximately 54 genera and over 1,400 species with a cosmopolitan distribution. Members of the family are well-known for their diverse secondary plant metabolites, and they play crucial roles in tropical and temperate forest ecosystems. Phylogenetic reconstruction of the Salicaceae has been historically challenging due to the limitations of molecular markers and the extensive history of hybridization and polyploidy within the family.

Variation in induced responses in volatile and non-volatile metabolites among six willow species: Do willow species share responses to herbivory?

Chemical variation is a critical aspect affecting performance among co-occurring plants. High chemical variation in metabolites with direct effects on insect herbivores supports chemical niche partitioning, and it can reduce the number of herbivores shared by co-occurring plant species. In contrast, low intraspecific variation in metabolites with indirect effects, such as induced volatile organic compounds (VOCs), may improve the attraction of specialist predators or parasitoids as they show high specificity to insect herbivores.

Effects of individual traits vs. trait syndromes on assemblages of various herbivore guilds associated with central European Salix.

Plants employ diverse anti-herbivore defences that can covary to form syndromes consisting of multiple traits. Such syndromes are hypothesized to impact herbivores more than individual defences. We studied 16 species of lowland willows occurring in central Europe and explored if their chemical and physical traits form detectable syndromes.

Leaf Endophytes Relationship with Host Metabolome Expression in Tropical Gymnosperms.

Plant-microbe interactions play a pivotal role in shaping host fitness, especially concerning chemical defense mechanisms. In cycads, establishing direct correlations between specific endophytic microbes and the synthesis of highly toxic defensive phytochemicals has been challenging. Our research delves into the intricate relationship between plant-microbe associations and the variation of secondary metabolite production in two closely related Zamia species that grow in distinct habitats; terrestrial and epiphytic.

Passive accumulation of alkaloids in inconspicuously colored frogs refines the evolutionary paradigm of acquired chemical defenses.

Understanding the origins of novel, complex phenotypes is a major goal in evolutionary biology. Poison frogs of the family Dendrobatidae have evolved the novel ability to acquire alkaloids from their diet for chemical defense at least three times. However, taxon sampling for alkaloids has been biased towards colorful species, without similar attention paid to inconspicuous ones that are often assumed to be undefended.

Phytochemical diversity impacts herbivory in a tropical rainforest tree community.

Metabolomics provides an unprecedented window into diverse plant secondary metabolites that represent a potentially critical niche dimension in tropical forests underlying species coexistence. Here, we used untargeted metabolomics to evaluate chemical composition of 358 tree species and its relationship with phylogeny and variation in light environment, soil nutrients, and insect herbivore leaf damage in a tropical rainforest plot. We report no phylogenetic signal in most compound classes, indicating rapid diversification in tree metabolomes.

Contrasting levels of β-diversity and underlying phylogenetic trends indicate different paths to chemical diversity in highland and lowland willow species.

Diverse specialised metabolites contributed to the success of vascular plants in colonising most terrestrial habitats. Understanding how distinct aspects of chemical diversity arise through heterogeneous environmental pressures can help us understand the effects of abiotic and biotic stress on plant evolution and community assembly. We examined highland and lowland willow species within a phylogenetic framework to test for trends in their chemical α-diversity (richness) and β-diversity (variation among species sympatric in elevation).

Leaf volatile and nonvolatile metabolites show different levels of specificity in response to herbivory.

Plants produce diverse chemical defenses with contrasting effects on different insect herbivores. Deploying herbivore-specific responses can help plants increase their defensive efficiency. Here, we explore how variation in induced plant responses correlates with herbivore species, order, feeding guild, and level of specialization.

Metabolomic Evenness Underlies Intraspecific Differences Among Lineages of a Wetland Grass.

The metabolome represents an important functional trait likely important to plant invasion success, but we have a limited understanding of whether the entire metabolome or targeted groups of compounds confer an advantage to invasive as compared to native taxa. We conducted a lipidomic and metabolomic analysis of the cosmopolitan wetland grass Phragmites australis. We classified features into metabolic pathways, subclasses, and classes.

Widespread herbivory cost in tropical nitrogen-fixing tree species.

Recent observations suggest that the large carbon sink in mature and recovering forests may be strongly limited by nitrogen. Nitrogen-fixing trees (fixers) in symbiosis with bacteria provide the main natural source of new nitrogen to tropical forests. However, abundances of fixers are tightly constrained, highlighting the fundamental unanswered question of what limits new nitrogen entering tropical ecosystems.

Chemical novelty facilitates herbivore resistance and biological invasions in some introduced plant species.

Ecological release from herbivory due to chemical novelty is commonly predicted to facilitate biological invasions by plants, but has not been tested on a community scale. We used metabolomics based on mass spectrometry molecular networks to assess the novelty of foliar secondary chemistry of 15 invasive plant species compared to 46 native species at a site in eastern North America. Locally, invasive species were more chemically distinctive than natives.

Host affinity of endophytic fungi and the potential for reciprocal interactions involving host secondary chemistry.

Premise: Interactions between fungal endophytes and their host plants present useful systems for identifying important factors affecting assembly of host-associated microbiomes. Here we investigated the role of secondary chemistry in mediating host affinity of asymptomatic foliar endophytic fungi using Psychotria spp. and Theobroma cacao (cacao) as hosts.

A comparison of inducible, ontogenetic, and interspecific sources of variation in the foliar metabolome in tropical trees.

Plant interactions with other organisms are mediated by chemistry, yet chemistry varies among conspecific and within individual plants. The foliar metabolome-the suite of small-molecule metabolites found in the leaf-changes during leaf ontogeny and is influenced by the signaling molecule jasmonic acid. Species differences in secondary metabolites are thought to play an important ecological role by limiting the host ranges of herbivores and pathogens, and hence facilitating competitive coexistence among plant species in species-rich plant communities such as tropical forests.

Recent advances in understanding the role of secondary metabolites in species-rich multitrophic networks.

Understanding coexistence in species-rich communities remains a primary challenge of ecology. Interactions mediated through multitrophic networks are thought to play an important role in sustaining species coexistence in the face of competition for resources. The identity of trophic partners and the intensity with which they interact are often mediated by diverse secondary metabolites.

Comparative foliar metabolomics of a tropical and a temperate forest community.

Plant enemies that attack chemically similar host species are thought to mediate competitive exclusion of chemically similar plants and select for chemical divergence among closely related species. This hypothesis predicts that plant defenses should diverge rapidly, minimizing phylogenetic signal. To evaluate this prediction, we quantified metabolomic similarity for 203 tree species that represent >89% of all individuals in large forest plots in Maryland and Panama.

A protocol for high-throughput, untargeted forest community metabolomics using mass spectrometry molecular networks.

Premise Of The Study: We describe a field collection, sample processing, and ultra-high-performance liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (UHPLC-MS/MS) instrumental and bioinformatics method developed for untargeted metabolomics of plant tissue and suitable for molecular networking applications.

Methods And Results: A total of 613 leaf samples from 204 tree species was collected in the field and analyzed using UHPLC-MS/MS. Matching of molecular fragmentation spectra generated over 125,000 consensus spectra representing unique molecular structures, 26,410 of which were linked to at least one structurally similar compound.

Recent breakthroughs in metabolomics promise to reveal the cryptic chemical traits that mediate plant community composition, character evolution and lineage diversification.

Contents 952 I. 952 II. 953 III.

Sources of variation in foliar secondary chemistry in a tropical forest tree community.

Specialist herbivores and pathogens could induce negative conspecific density dependence among their hosts and thereby contribute to the diversity of plant communities. A small number of hyperdiverse genera comprise a large portion of tree diversity in tropical forests. These closely related congeners are likely to share natural enemies.

Sharing and community curation of mass spectrometry data with Global Natural Products Social Molecular Networking.

The potential of the diverse chemistries present in natural products (NP) for biotechnology and medicine remains untapped because NP databases are not searchable with raw data and the NP community has no way to share data other than in published papers. Although mass spectrometry (MS) techniques are well-suited to high-throughput characterization of NP, there is a pressing need for an infrastructure to enable sharing and curation of data. We present Global Natural Products Social Molecular Networking (GNPS; http://gnps.

Different axes of environmental variation explain the presence vs. extent of cooperative nest founding associations in Polistes paper wasps.

Ecological constraints on independent breeding are recognised as major drivers of cooperative breeding across diverse lineages. How the prevalence and degree of cooperative breeding relates to ecological variation remains unresolved. Using a large data set of cooperative nesting in Polistes wasps we demonstrate that different aspects of cooperative breeding are likely to be driven by different aspects of climate.

Fine-scale niche structure of Neotropical forests reflects a legacy of the Great American Biotic Interchange.

The tendency of species to retain their ancestral niches may link processes that determine community assembly with biogeographic histories that span geological time scales. Biogeographic history is likely to have had a particularly strong impact on Neotropical forests because of the influence of the Great American Biotic Interchange, which followed emergence of a land connection between North and South America ~3 Ma. Here we examine the community structure, ancestral niches and ancestral distributions of the related, hyperdiverse woody plant genera Psychotria and Palicourea (Rubiaceae) in Panama.