What is Chemical Ecology?

 

         Want to be a Chemical Ecologist? 

Let's Simply Know 'What is Chemical Ecology'?

All of us heard more or less about the term Ecology. Ecology is a term which denotes interactions of any kind of organisms (for example, Human, Other Mammals, Birds, Reptiles, Insects, Plants and Micro-organisms like Algae, Fungi, Bacteria etc.) with the nature or with each other. How do they understand the nature? How do they take their own position in the nature? How do they behave with their environment? How do they make perception of their environmental partners? These all questions come to explain the ecology in simple sense.

Now let's understand chemical ecology in brief:

Chemical ecology deals with the ecological understanding of specific interaction in between the organisms which are parts of the environment. These interactions consist of exchanging metabolic chemical signals which help the organism to identify the pray and predators by sensing them systematically. Let's talk about plants. Plants are one of the major members of the ecological system which communicates with various organisms i.e. insects, fungi and bacteria in their life-time. 

Now let's take some examples which show some phenomena of chemical ecology. Think about the interaction of insects and plants. There are several insects which feed on different plants including crops in their larval stage to grow up. These insects are called insect-herbivores. They could be devastating for the agriculture as many of them have the capacity to destroy large amount of crop when they infest on the crop fields, and farmers face a terrible crop loss which hampered them financially. Now the question is, how plants behave with these insect herbivores? Plants are not there to sacrifice themselves for the sake of insect's larvae. Plant's look calm and quiet but actually they are very sensitive and intelligent! They can sense the insects instantly when they are being attacked by receiving the chemicals present in the insect's larval saliva during biting the plant's leaf. Immediately after that they send their own chemical signals to the other parts of their body (means other leaves and roots) and all the parts of the plants become aware about the attack and start to produce specialized metabolites (chemicals produced during metabolism) which is harmful for the insects. When these chemicals are acquired in sufficient level then these enter into the insect's digestive system with every nibble and create toxic effect to the insect's larvae and as a result insect's larvae stop to feed. Thus plants defend themselves and the specialized metabolites are called 'Defense Metabolites'. We shall learn later about these, as 'Defense Metabolite' or 'Specialized Metabolism' of plants is a large area in the field of chemical ecology.

Interaction in between plants and microorganisms is another major area of chemical ecology which deals with the exploration of plant’s perception to microorganisms. These microorganisms consist of both associates and enemies. Mutualistic communications of plants with the associate microorganisms are beneficial for plants for betterment of growth and both biotic and abiotic stress management. This phenomenon could be very useful for improvement of crop yield. Mutualistic endosymbionts (any microbe which infect the plants but does not make any harm, instead makes a symbiosis with the plants) are specific microorganisms which help plants in terms of better nutrient uptake and improved metabolism which leads to increased fitness and growth. Therefore, selection and application of endosymbiotic microorganisms for increased crop yield is a promising area to reduce the food crisis in the massively populated modern world.

Apart from these, there are several other phenomena which come in the field of chemical ecology, such as, pollination of flower by bees or birds, flower's fragrance mediated invitation by plants to the friendly insects, sending alarm by one plant to another plant by naturally produce volatile chemicals etc. Therefore, chemical ecology is basically full of mysterious and hugely interesting phenomena. There are number of scientific groups of several research institution and universities works on these field throughout the world. Among them Max-Planck Institute for Chemical Ecology, a world class research institute is fully devoted to thls field. In India, multiple groups in National Institute of Plant Genome Research, New Delhi; NCBS, Bangalore; IISER Pune are successfully working in this field.