A comparison of inducible, ontogenetic, and interspecific sources of variation in the foliar metabolome in tropical trees
Bibliographic record
Abstract
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. Yet it remains unclear how inducible and ontogenetic variation compare with interspecific variation, particularly in tropical trees. Here, we take advantage of novel methods to assemble mass spectra of all compounds in leaf extracts into molecular networks that quantify their chemical structural similarity in order to compare inducible and ontogenetic chemical variation to among-species variation in species-rich tropical tree genera. We ask (i) whether young and mature leaves differ chemically, (ii) whether jasmonic acid-inducible chemical variation differs between young and mature leaves, and (iii) whether interspecific exceeds intraspecific chemical variation for four species from four hyperdiverse tropical tree genera. We observed significant effects of the jasmonic acid treatment for three of eight combinations of species and ontogenetic stage evaluated. Three of the four species also exhibited large metabolomic differences with leaf ontogenetic stage. The profound effect of leaf ontogenetic stage on the foliar metabolome suggests a qualitative turnover in secondary chemistry with leaf ontogeny. We also quantified foliar metabolomes for 45 congeners of the four focal species. Chemical similarity was much greater within than between species for all four genera, even when within-species comparisons included leaves that differed in age and jasmonic acid treatment. Despite ontogenetic and inducible variation within species, chemical differences among congeneric species may be sufficient to partition niche space with respect to chemical defense.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".