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Plants produce diverse chemical defences with contrasting effects on different insect herbivores. Deploying herbivore-specific responses can help plants increase their defensive efficacy. Here, we exposed 149 plants of Salix fragilis to 22 herbivore species from various orders and feeding guilds and explored the induced responses in volatiles and non-volatile leaf metabolites.
The volatile composition was best explained by chewing damage and insect order. Furthermore, we recorded significant differences in elicited volatiles among some species within the orders. Variation in non-volatile leaf metabolites was mainly explained by the presence of insects, as plants exposed to herbivores showed significantly different metabolites from controls.​

Gibson Aubona has joined our team as a new doctoral student. Gibson has gained his MSc. degree at the University of Goroka where he studied environmental toxicology. He has already collaborated with our lab on several projects on chemical ecology of plant-insect interactions in Papua New Guinea. During his doctoral studies, he will now focus on the chemical defences and biotic interactions associated with temperate and tropical tree species from the willow family. ​

​We are pleased to welcome and host Manidip, a PhD student from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznán, Poland. Manidip’s project involves quantifying volatiles from different species of grasses and determining whether they play a role in oviposition preferences and recruitment of natural enemies of grass-feeding butterflies. Manidip collaborated with our team to learn the pipeline of collecting and analyzing volatiles from grasses. Our collaboration started in May 2022, when Priscila (our PhD student) helped develop a method to collect volatiles from oaks and grasses in Poznán. After finishing the collections, Manidip came to Ceske Budejovice to learn how to analyze volatiles using GC-MS (Gas-Chromatography coupled with Mass Spectrometry). The experiments will show how phytohormone treatments can induce plants to release herbivore-induced plant volatiles that can recruit natural enemies.