We Are What We Eat: A Stoichiometric and Ecometabolomic Study of Caterpillars Feeding on Two Pine Subspecies of Pinus sylvestris
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MDPI
Materia
Plant-insect Metabolomics Processionary moth Scots pine Secondary metabolites Herbivory
Date
2018-12-24Referencia bibliográfica
Rivas-Ubach, A., Peñuelas, J., Hódar, J. A., Oravec, M., Paša-Tolić, L., Urban, O., & Sardans, J. (2019). We Are What We Eat: A Stoichiometric and Ecometabolomic Study of Caterpillars Feeding on Two Pine Subspecies of Pinus sylvestris. International journal of molecular sciences, 20(1), 59.
Sponsorship
This research was funded by the research fellowship (JAE) from the CSIC (A.R.-U), the European Research Council Synergy grant SyG-2013-610028 IMBALANCE-P (J.P., J.S.), the Spanish Government projects CGL2016-48074-P and OAPN 022/2008 (PROPINOL) (J.P., J.S.), the Catalan Government project SGR 2014-274 (J.P., J.S.), DOE Office of Science User Facility sponsored by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (A.R.-U), and by the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sports of the Czech Republic (grant No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_013/0001609, and No. LO1415) (O.U., M.O).Abstract
Many studies have addressed several plant-insect interaction topics at nutritional,
molecular, physiological, and evolutionary levels. However, it is still unknown how flexible the
metabolism and the nutritional content of specialist insect herbivores feeding on different closely
related plants can be. We performed elemental, stoichiometric, and metabolomics analyses on leaves
of two coexisting Pinus sylvestris subspecies and on their main insect herbivore; the caterpillar of
the processionary moth (Thaumetopoea pityocampa). Caterpillars feeding on different pine subspecies
had distinct overall metabolome structure, accounting for over 10% of the total variability. Although
plants and insects have very divergent metabolomes, caterpillars showed certain resemblance to their
plant-host metabolome. In addition, few plant-related secondary metabolites were found accumulated
in caterpillar tissues which could potentially be used for self-defense. Caterpillars feeding on N and
P richer needles had lower N and P tissue concentration and higher C:N and C:P ratios, suggesting
that nutrient transfer is not necessarily linear through trophic levels and other plant-metabolic factors
could be interfering. This exploratory study showed that little chemical differences between plant
food sources can impact the overall metabolome of specialist insect herbivores. Significant nutritional
shifts in herbivore tissues could lead to larger changes of the trophic web structure.