Plant Eco-Metabolomics Group

Exploring phytochemical diversity

Plants live embedded in complex ecological networks involving herbivores, microbes, fungi, pollinators, and neighboring plants. As sessile organisms, they rely on an extraordinary diversity of specialized metabolites to sense, respond to, and shape their biotic and abiotic environment. This chemical diversity integrates evolutionary history, environmental variation, and ecological pressures, and plays a central role in structuring species interactions and ecosystem dynamics. Yet, despite its importance, the vast majority of plant chemical diversity remains unexplored, leaving a major gap in our understanding of how ecosystems function. Our goal is to explore and characterize this tremendous chemical space, to achieve a more integrated understanding of natural systems and to harness this knowledge for the development of solutions to major challenges faced by human societies.

Objectives

Our research aims to uncover how plant chemical diversity mediates interactions across ecological scales. We seek to (i) exhaustively characterize the chemical compounds and molecular families involved in plant–plant, plant–insect, and plant–microbe interactions, and to identify the environmental and evolutionary drivers shaping this chemical variation; (ii) develop novel, integrative, and accessible tools to describe, organize, and interpret the vast diversity of chemical structures occurring in nature; (iii) apply insights from chemical ecology and eco-metabolomics to address societal challenges, including sustainable agriculture, biodiversity conservation, and ecosystem management.