Conveners
Current Status and Challenges of Ecometabolomics in Biodiversity Research
- Henriette Uthe (IPB Halle)
Agricultural expansion into natural habitats and unsustainable practices, like those caused by oil palm cultivation in Southeast Asia, harm biodiversity. Wildlife in these disturbed areas faces threats from humans, predators, and pesticides, but how these factors affect their health is less understood. We studied wild southern pig-tailed macaques (Macaca nemestrina) living at the interface...
Anthropogenic impacts such as deforestation, habitat fragmentation and hunting have a significant impact on wildlife, reducing biodiversity and affecting the physiological health of many endangered species. To monitor the welfare of wildlife, the use of non-invasively collected samples such as feces is becoming increasingly valuable for environmental and ecological research. Fecal metabolomics...
Fruits have evolved a range of traits to attract seed dispersers, in which chemical signals, such as scent, play a key role. Among these, aliphatic esters are notable for their consistent presence in ripe fruits of species that rely on frugivores for seed dispersal, yet their ecological role and evolutionary origin remain poorly understood. Emerging evidence suggests that these compounds may...
Untargeted metabolomics has transformed ecological research by revealing the extraordinary chemical diversity of organisms and their interactions. Yet most signals detected by LC-MS remain unannotated, forming the so-called ‘dark metabolome’. A contemporary and growing debate asks: does the dark metabolome reflect a vast unknown chemical space, or are we inflating chemical diversity through...
Ecometabolomics has long been a cornerstone of biodiversity research at iDiv. To strengthen this approach, the Ecometeor platform was established to integrate advanced metabolomics techniques and expertise into iDiv’s research, with the goal of uncovering the chemical mechanisms underlying ecological patterns and processes in plants, insects, soil, water, and even the atmosphere. Although the...
