| Project Detail |
Through the lens of chemistry, every organism, biotic interaction, and ecosystem, reveals a unique skeleton of molecular structures. As sessile organisms, plants produce throughout their lifetime an astonishing diversity of compounds to cope with the abiotic and biotic constraints of their environment. Phytochemical compounds have been shown to enhance tolerance against abiotic stresses such as UV radiation or extreme temperatures and increase resistance against herbivores and pathogens. This phytochemical diversity, commonly named “the plant metabolome”, is directly linked to an individual’s genome, physiology and environmental context, thus offering a novel perspective to mechanistically explore ecosystem functioning. Furthermore, many molecules produced by plants display pharmacological properties, making them an invaluable source of medicines (e.g. anticancer, antibacterial, analgesic, anti-inflammatory, antitumor, or antiviral). Accordingly, most of the global population directly uses natural products as their primary source of medicine, and 70% of drugs used for treating human health are derived from natural product discovery programs. Sadly, time is running out. Earth is experiencing a major biodiversity crisis, with estimates placing 20% of known species at high risk of extinction. Importantly, these estimates do not consider the large number of rare and as yet undescribed species for which the metabolome remains unknown. There is thus a critical need to explore the hidden diversity of natural compounds produced by vegetation at the global scale. In doing so, we may finally be able to mitigate the repercussions of this irreversible loss of fundamental information for ecological research and human society.The time is ripe to integrate recent advances in analytical chemistry and ‘big data’ analytics for exploring the molecular diversity of thousands of species simultaneously, to enhance our understanding of ecosystem functions, the processes underlying biodiversity, and novel drug discovery programs. Given this unprecedented land use change and massive destruction of regions possessing untold value to medicine and scientific research, characterizing and comparing phytochemical diversity at global scale is poised to become one of the hottest topics in functional, community and ecosystem ecology in the next decade. Through the project MetaDiv, I will be able to position myself, and my research group, at the forefront of this field. Based on an unprecedented phytochemical dataset including thousands of plant species form arctic, temperate, equatorial, and Mediterranean ecosystems grown across multiple botanical gardens of Switzerland, coupled to the latest generation of High-Resolution Mass Spectrometers, as well as the latest methods in molecular networking and machine-learning, I aim to obtain a first image of the phytochemical landscape worldwide. With the project MetaDiv I intend to: 1) accurately characterize phytochemical diversity across thousands of plant species, 2) identify the evolutionary and ecological drivers of phytochemical diversity variation, 3) provide new predictive tools for characterizing phytochemical diversity, and 4) merge the extrapolated facets of phytochemical diversity with current biodiversity metrics. By combing our metabolomic data with existing repository on plant community, environment and phylogeny, we will not only advance the field of fundamental ecosystem functioning research, but also contribute to society through drug discovery programs and biodiversity conservation.
Grant number
215724
Funding scheme
Project funding
Call
Projects Life Sciences 2022 October
Approved amount
373,283 CHF
Status
Ongoing |
