Origin and maintenance of chemical diversity in a species-rich tropical tree lineage

Nature Ecology & Evolution
Diego SalazarPaul V A Fine

Abstract

Plant secondary metabolites play important ecological and evolutionary roles, most notably in the deterrence of natural enemies. The classical theory explaining the evolution of plant chemical diversity is that new defences arise through a pairwise co-evolutionary arms race between plants and their specialized natural enemies. However, plant species are bombarded by dozens of different herbivore taxa from disparate phylogenetic lineages that span a wide range of feeding strategies and have distinctive physiological constraints that interact differently with particular plant metabolites. How do plant defence chemicals evolve under such multiple and potentially contrasting selective pressures imposed by diverse herbivore communities? To tackle this question, we exhaustively characterized the chemical diversity and insect herbivore fauna from 31 sympatric species of Amazonian Protieae (Burseraceae) trees. Using a combination of phylogenetic, metabolomic and statistical learning tools, we show that secondary metabolites that were associated with repelling herbivores (1) were more frequent across the Protieae phylogeny and (2) were found in average higher abundance than other compounds. Our findings suggest that generalist herbivore...Continue Reading

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Citations

Nov 15, 2019·Ecology Letters·William C Wetzel, Susan R Whitehead
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Apr 21, 2021·Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America·Matthew L HoldingChristopher L Parkinson

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Methods Mentioned

BETA
light-scattering

Software Mentioned

R package Vegan
Picante package
R package Geiger
Glmnet
Picante R package
Ade4
MrBayes
LASSO
R
R package Phangorn

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