Metabolomic analysis of the interaction between plants and herbivores

By J. J. Jansen, A. J. William, A. Ae, E. Marsden-Edwards, Ae Wim, H. van der Putten, Ae Royston, Goodacre Ae, N. V. van Dam. Metabolomics, 2009

152 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Insect herbivores by necessity have to deal with a large arsenal of plant defence metabolites. The levels of defence compounds may be increased by insect damage. These induced plant responses may also affect the metabolism and performance of successive insect herbivores. As the chemical nature of induced responses is largely unknown, global metabolomic analyses are a valuable tool to gain more insight into the metabolites possibly involved in such interactions. This study analyzed the interaction between feral cabbage (Brassica oleracea) and small cabbage white caterpillars (Pieris rapae) and how previous attacks to the plant affect the caterpillar metabolism. Because plants may be induced by shoot and root herbivory, we compared shoot and root induction by treating the plants on either plant part with jasmonic acid. Extracts of the plants and the caterpillars were chemically analysed using Ultra Performance Liquid Chromatography/Time of Flight Mass Spectrometry (UPLCT/MS). The study revealed that the levels of three structurally related coumaroylquinic acids were elevated in plants treated on the shoot. The levels of these compounds in plants and caterpillars were highly correlated: these compounds were defined as the ‘metabolic interface’. The role of these metabolites could only be discovered using simultaneous analysis of the plant and caterpillar metabolomes. We conclude that a metabolomics approach is useful in discovering unexpected bioactive compounds involved in ecological interactions between plants and their herbivores and higher trophic levels.

Subfields: Ecology, Insect Science, Plant Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/cde7d7f4fb44dbe7515cc9822c7edfc316a33c11

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Citations in the corpus

Multitrophic interactions below and above ground: en route to the next level (2011, background): “…be caused by changes in herbivore quality or quantity due to systemically induced resistance in infested plants, which may directly affect the abundance and performance of parasitoids feeding on these inferior hosts (Poveda et al. 2005; Soler et al. 2005; Jansen et al. 2009; Qiu 2011 The Authors.”
Ecological metabolomics: overview of current developments and future challenges (2011, background): “…of polar metabolites have found a great chemical variation in the metabolites used by plants to defend themselves against insect attacks (Widarto et al. 2006; Jones et al. 2006; Poëssel et al. 2006; Jansen et al. 2009; Leiss et al. 2009a, b; Kuzina et al. 2009; Mirnezhad et al. 2010) (Table 2).”
Community‐level plant palatability increases with elevation as insect herbivore abundance declines (2017, methodology): “Future work using communitywide metabolomics approaches for obtaining more information on leaf chemistry, and identifying the dominant chemical defence strategies along the elevation gradient might help overcoming these obstacles (Van Dam & Poppy 2008; Jansen et al. 2009).”
Metabolomics in pesticide research and development: review and future perspectives (2011, methodology): “Jansen et al. (2009) studied the system cabbage (Brassica oleracea L.)-small cabbage white caterpillar (Pieris rapae Lepidoptera: Pieridae) applying UPLC-TOF/MS metabolomics.”